Cycling Hipsters, if you were truly worth your ironic sideburns and artisanal grease stains, you'd abandon that fixie and mount one of these bad boys. The Smithsonian honors National Bike Month with a dive into the image archives for this photo, the forerunner of the modern bicycle: a draisine from around 1818. More about this "dandy horse," below.

In 1817, Karl Drais, a young inventor in Baden, Germany, designed and built a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was straddled and propelled by walking swiftly. Drais called it the laufmaschine or “running machine.”

A forester for the Grand Duke of Baden, Drais used his laufmaschine to inspect the Duke’s forest. The laufmaschine soon became a novelty among Europeans, who named it the “draisine.”

By 1818, the draisine craze reached the United States. Charles Wilson Peale, a well-known portrait artist, helped to popularize the draisine by displaying one in his museum in Philadelphia. Many American examples were made, and rentals and riding rinks became available in Eastern cities.

By 1820, the high cost of the vehicle, combined with its lack of practical value, limited its appeal and made it little more than an expensive toy. The two-wheeled vehicle would not become sustained until pedals were added in the late 1800s.

Donated to the Smithsonian in 1964, this draisine is the oldest cycle in its collection of 61 cycles. They reflect social trends and technological developments that have shaped the growth and popularity of riding since 1818.

Lots more wonderful old things like this in the Smithsonian's exhibition, "America on the Move." (thanks, Jessica Porter Sadeq)

This fine bit of analysis by Matthew Lynn for Bloomberg from January 2007 is worth a revisit, in light of Nokia’s and Motorola’s recent quarterly results:

The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won’t be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business.

The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant.

Motorola just posted an $86 million loss. Nokia lost $1.2 billion (with a “b”).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my favorite new features of FileMaker Pro 12 is the ExecuteSQL function, which allows you to perform a SELECT SQL query against your FileMaker tables. ExecuteSQL allows you to use SQL to create calculations that otherwise might be very difficult or cumbersome. For example, in the past, if you wanted to get the list of values that had been used anywhere in the field areaCode in your contact table, you had to first create a value list using that field, then create the calculation: ValueListItems ( Get ( FileName ) ; “AreaCodes” ). It worked, but it was a bit of a hack to have to create that extra value list.

Now, all you need is:

ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT DISTINCT areaCode FROM contact" ; "" ; "" ) /* The last two empty parameters tell FileMaker to use the default comma and carriage return as column and row separators */

Okay, so it does require learning a bit of SQL (check out the W3Schools’ SQL Tutorial). But many queries are straightforward, and using SQL this way can simplify the relationship graph.

Say I wanted to get all the area codes used in Massachusetts. Using the old value list method, I would need to create a field somewhere to store the abbreviation “MA”, create a relationship from that field to the contact::state field, and define my value list to use only related values starting from the table with the new field. With ExecuteSQL, all I need is to update the formula to:

ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT DISTINCT areaCode FROM contact WHERE UPPER(state)=?" ; "" ; "" ; "MA" ) /* The fourth parameter is used to fill in the ? in the query. It could be a field instead of a text constant */

Here’s one of my favorites: often it’s useful to know the name of the base table (the ones define on the Tables tab of the Manage Database dialog) that is the source for a table occurrence (the tables that appear in the graph). You may have lots of table occurrences, named leads, students, personsOfInterest, relatives, and so one, but each is really an instance of the contact table. Outside the Manage Database dialog, any reference to a table is really a reference to a table occurrence (so Get ( LayoutTableName ) returns leads, for example, not contact).

In the past, it would be necessary to name each consistently to include the underlying base table (so contact_leads, contact_students, contact_personsOfInterest, etc.), and then parse the table occurrence name. Be careful changing table names! But with SQL, you can use the following to get the name of the base table of the current layout:

ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT BaseTableName FROM FileMaker_Tables WHERE TableName=?" ; "" ; "" ; Get ( LayoutTableName ) )

 
FileMaker_Tables is a special table you can query via SQL to get a list of all table occurrences, and the BaseTableName column tells you the name of the source table.

You can replace Get ( LayoutTableName ) with any table occurrence name to get it’s base table. I like the following calculation field that stores the name of the table as data, which can be extremely useful when exporting and importing data:

Let ( [ FQFN = GetFieldName ( Self ) ; tableOccurrence = GetValue ( Substitute ( FQFN ; "::" ; ¶ ) ; 1 ) ] ; ExecuteSQL ( "SELECT BaseTableName FROM FileMaker_Tables WHERE TableName=?" ; "" ; "" ; tableOccurrence ) )

The two variables in the Let function first get the fully qualified field name (including table occurrence name) of the calculation, an then parses out just the table occurrence name for use in the query. Since the calculation never makes reference to anything but Self, you can copy and paste this calculation field to any table without needing any editing.

What’s your favorite use of ExecuteSQL?

  Posted by Annie Colbert

In 1946, George Orwell laid out his theories on writing in an essay titled “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell criticized the use of complicated language and promoted clear, simple prose whenever possible. The essay concluded with six rules summarizing Orwell’s opinion.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Via Lists of Note.

Improve your writing.

Permalink

Leave a comment  »

Everybody’s excited about the new Apple iPad‘s high-resolution screen. But ultimately, the Retina display is just a pretty face. It can’t do anything that the screens on previous models couldn’t do.

In fact, just about all of the features that are considered “new” in the newiPad are really just bigger helpings of the old capabilities: More pixels on the screen. More graphics performance. More megapixels in the camera. More megabits per second with the mobile broadband connection. There’s more of everything. But what’s fundamentally different?

One of the least appreciated new features is one that truly brings entirely new capabilities to the iPad. That feature is Bluetooth 4.0 support.

Read this column at the Computerworld.com site.

• MIC Now Selling 3-In-1 Camera Connection Kit for iPad
• iPad 2 Compatible Camera Apps [First Look]
• Twitter Gets A Much-Improved New Interface on iPad
• iPad Camera Connection Kit Now Available For Pre-Order
• Yahoo! Messenger Gets Voice & Video Chat on iPad 2