At Any Price

[1.0 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Mrs. Salad loooves Dennis Quaid. Ever since Breaking Away. So this was a must-get-for-my-sweetie at Netflix.

I'm not jealous or anything. And I'm pretty sure I would dislike this movie anyway.

Dennis (I call him Dennis) plays Henry Whipple, Iowa farmer. (Although, according to IMDB, "Iowa" is mostly played in the movie by "Dekalb, Illinois".) Henry is an aspiring agricultural mogul, even to the extent of attending a fellow farmer's funeral in order to make a pitch to buy the deceased's acreage. He also sells seeds for "Liberty Seed" an eeevil corporation (standing in for Monsanto, I think), and he's guilty of some bad behavior there too.

One of Henry's two sons, Dean (played by Zac Efron), is still at home. Henry would like him to take over the dynasty, but Dean would prefer to become a NASCAR driver. Who wouldn't? He's moody and self-centered, and treats his girlfriend like shit.

I might have liked this movie better if any of the main characters were more likeable or interesting, or if they overcame their character flaws to redeem themselves. But (as the movie develops) they only reveal more flaws, succumb to them, and are not called to account.

Your mileage may vary. Roger Ebert, before he was promoted to doing movie reviews for God, gave it 4/4 stars. And this guy found Dennis "at his most vulnerable and entertaining in a long time." I thought he—sorry—read his wooden dialog perfunctorarily, as if he realized what a sucky movie he'd been roped into.


Last Modified 2024-01-27 5:46 AM EDT

Reading Schedule Generator

[http://farm1.staticflickr.com/119/281194868_23e0c0e390_n.jpg]

May 2023 Update: Fixed a bug with setting the default for the "Start date" field. A bug I should have noticed years ago.

October 2020 Update: Added "Pages/day" option to form and appropriately checked CGI code to handle it.

November 2019 Update: Moved sources to GitHub, links below.

June 2018 Update: Whoa. Embarassing bugfix, caused due to my minimal understanding of Javascript. I keep expecting it to work like Perl.

February 2018 Update: Stylesheet/template changes, described at end of article. Appropriate changes made to article body.

January 2018 Update: Some major form changes, described at end of article. Appropriate changes made to article body.

December 2017 Update: More changes, described at end of article.

October 2017 Update: I regret that I let this article get badly out of whack with reality. Notably, most of the links to my code, which were on the old UNH "pubpages" server, went stale when I retired. In addition, I've cleaned up the code some and fixed a nasty Daylight Savings Time-related bug. I hope. Further notes at the bottom of the article.

Note: this post is out of whack with normal Pun Salad content. Only recommended for:

  1. computer geeks who (like me) tend to approach everyday issues by asking: how could I write code to make this easier?; or
  2. psychologists who might be interested in whatever mental aberration causes the behavior exhibited in (a).

A few years back I noticed I was doing a miserable job of reading the magazines to which I was subscribed; the new issue would show up and I would have just read few if any articles in the previous one.

A similar problem with books: I would check them out of the library and return them unread. And my to-be-read pile of owned books just was getting bigger.

What worked for me was to set up a reading schedule for each "new" book or magazine. Simply read through a reasonable, fixed number of pages each day, until done. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I'm currently implementing this scheme by generating a calendar-format schedule for each item in HTML. Example for a book I read back in 2014, Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez:

[Sample Reading
Schedule]

I (1) print the schedule from my web browser, (2) cut it out, (3) attach to a card, and (4) use the result as a bookmark for the item. And each day, I try to meet the page goal for each item.

(Not that it matters, but for magazines I staple the schedule to one of the subscription cards that invariably accompany each issue. For books, I tape it to one of the plastic advertising cards the Yankee Candle company sends us, which are significantly more substantial.)

Now I'm not psycho about this: it's OK to get ahead of the goals if the material is compelling and I have the time. It's also OK to fall behind if there's just too much other stuff going on. (However, in my experience, just knowing that I've "fallen behind" is just enough self-nudging motivation to carve out some extra time to catch up later.)

Enough for the mechanics, on to the code. For a long time I ran a Perl script from a Linux command line to generate a schedule. But I realized that it would be (slightly) more flexible to set up an HTML form to get the schedule parameters, calling a CGI backend to display the result.

The form I'm using is here. (Do I have to mention that you can use your browser's source-viewing capabilities to view the HTML source? Nah, probably not.) But it looks like this [as of October 2020]:

[Blank
Reading Schedule Generator form]

[December 2017: removed paragraph about the jQuery datepicker, no longer used.]

So you fill out the form, for example:

[Reading
Schedule Generator Form]

[Note: I urge you to try it yourself.]

… hit the submit button and the resulting page should produce the appropriate schedule. (I'm pretty sure it would work for you if you want to try it.)

The real work is performed by the Perl CGI script, which relies heavily on the smarts contained in the CGI.pm, HTML::Template, and Date::Manip Time::Piece modules.

If you'd like to look at things (feel free to steal adapt to your own preferences if you are so inclined), the GitHub directory contains:

  • reading_sched_gen.html — the initial web form (also available here). Install in a web-accessible location.

  • reading_sched.cgi — the CGI script kicked off by the form's Submit button. Install whereever you put CGI scripts, and update the appropriate line in the form.

  • cal_bookmark.tmpl — HTML::Template file used by the CGI script to generate the bookmark. Install in a web-accessible location and update the line setting $template_file in the CGI script.

  • reading_sched.css — the CSS style file used by the bookmark. Install in a web-accessible location and update the appropriate line in the template.

Additional notes (October 2017).

  • As previously mentioned, the original version of the CGI script lived on the UNH "pubpages" webserver, where I enjoyed root access. It's now on the Pun Salad server, where I don't. This is problematic when you need to install some random CPAN perl module.

    Solution (or, at least, what I'm doing): use cpanm to install necessary modules "unprivileged" and put use local::lib; in scripts to find them. (This seems to work for CGIs, surprisingly.)

  • The most recent bug squashed was one I've struggled with for years: if your timezone does DST, not all days are 24 hours: the "spring forward" day has only 23; the "fall back" day has 25. This resulted in strange behavior when a reading schedule traversed one of those days.

    The fix turned out to be relatively easy: tell the script to pretend it's in the UTC timezone. Duh. That's accomplished by (for example) the line

    $startdate->config( 'setdate', 'now,UTC' );

    [Update November 2019: This bugfix seems to no longer be necessary, removed.]

December 2017 Update: Some minor surgery on this tool to report.

  • After years, I noticed that, in many cases, I wanted to spend a specific number of days reading a book or magazine. This involved me looking at a calendar, and finger-counting to figure out what end-date to specify in the form.

    Duh. That's an unforgivable user interface sin, is it not?

    So the input form now requests either (a) the end-date for the reading schedule, or (b) the number of days the schedule should run from the start date.

    If you enter both, the end date will be ignored, but why would you do that?

  • The form has been otherwise (ahem) brought into the 21st century. Title, start date, start page, and end page input fields now sport the HTML attribute required. The type attribute is used specify that the title should be text, the start/end pages should be number, and the start/end dates should be date.

    That means the web browser's native date-picker UI will be used for date entry instead of the previous jQuery datepicker. (Some old browsers don't support this, but since I'm not being paid to support old browsers, I can say "gee, that's too bad", without guilt.)

  • Some Javascript is still used for client-side verification: the start page has to be less than the end page, either the number-of-days or the end-date input has to be there, and if the end-date is specified, it has to be after the start date.

  • Web Security 101 saith: your CGI must still check the validity of its inputs. So all that code is still in the CGI. But…

  • I also modified the CGI script to use the Perl Time::Piece module for calendar arithmetic instead of Date::Manip. This greatly simplified the code, and (somewhat surprisingly) Time::Piece seems to do the right thing when the reading schedule overlaps a Daylight Saving time warp.

    I still think Date::Manip is vital for heavy-lifting Date/Time calculations. But it's overkill here.

January 2018 Update: Some minor surgery on the form. Did I say above that I had brought it into the 21st century? Not quite. My web design skills have always been weak, since that was never my job; I was pretty much a "get the content up" guy, and I only learned enough CSS to make things look the way I wanted at the time. That's the case here too. Summary:

  • Rearranged the form elements so they had a more intuitive ordering.

  • Switched to using an embeded stylesheet.

  • Used some advanced (non-table) styles for form layout.

I think it looks prettier now.

February 2018 Update: See above about my web design skills being weak. I can't say that the most recent changes make the design "good", but I think I can claim "better".

  • Changed to a standalone style sheet for the generated calendar bookmark.

  • The bookmark used tables for layout. I hear that's been frowned upon for, oh, the last 20 years or so. Layout now accomplished by CSS.

  • I changed the outer boundary of the bookmark from a dotted line to dashes. I think that looks better.

October 2020 Update: Occasionally, mostly for magazines, I really want to read a fixed number of pages per day. That forced me to do some math in my head. ("This month's issue has 88 pages, I want to read four pages per day, so that's … um … 22 days.")

Not particularly challenging, but why do I have a computer, if not to offload such tasks upon?

So: you can either specify (1) a number of days; (2) an end date; or (3) pages/day. The form should check to make sure you've specified one of those, no more, no less.

If you specify a N pages/day parameter, the final day on the schedule may be between 1 and N. That's math. A feature, not a bug.

May 2023 Update: I still haven't come close to learning JavaScript, it turns out. The code I snipped from somewhere that sets the default value for the "Start date" field to today's date seemed simple and reasonable…

document.getElementById("startdate").valueAsDate = new Date();

The problem is that sometimes it filled in the field with tomorrow's date.

Specifically, if I accessed the form after 7pm EST.

Or after 6pm EDT.

Yes, it was filling in the current date in the GMT (UTC) timezone. Which for five or six hours every day is tomorrow. That's for me in New Hampshire. That bad-default window gets larger the further west you go. And the opposite problem occurs for browsers going east from Greenwich: they will occasionally see a default start date of yesterday.

In my defense: have I mentioned that I haven't learned Javascript? But (mea culpa) I had no clue that it would have been a good idea to test in different timezones.

The Google brought up long-ago debates on whether this was a feature or a bug in JavaScript. Doesn't matter: it's the way it works, and it must be worked around. This Stack Overflow post provided a fix I could easily patch in, a two-liner replacing the one-liner above:

var today = new Date();
document.getElementById("startdate").valueAsDate = 
    new Date(today.getFullYear(), today.getMonth(), today.getDate(), 10);

One final bit of coding trivia: the Stack Overflow post used "12" instead of "10" in that final line. At first I thought that was obviously correct: at noon UTC the entire planet is on the same calendar page, right?

Hah. No. The entire planet is never on the same calendar page. See Peter Moore's answer to Is there ever a time when the entire planet is experiencing the same date? The best you can do is the hour of 10am UTC. Then the code above will give the wrong default for only the users in Kiribati (aka Christmas Island), where it will be yesterday; and folks on a handful of different Pacific islands, where it will be tomorrow.

Or maybe it's the other way around. In any case, sorry folks.

(I will be happy to test this further and verify the assertions above if anyone wants to pay for my plane fare. A 24-hour stop in each time zone shoud suffice. There are a lot of them.)


Last Modified 2023-05-24 7:10 AM EDT