One Hit Wonder

This was actually faster to make than I thought! I made a minimalist diaper bag that we call the One Hit Wonder. It holds one diaper and one travel-size package of wipes; no more. It zips, and has an attachment loop. We grab it when we go to the store; we don't expect to need a diaper, but if we do, the One Hit Wonder has enough (one) to get home again without screams for a diaper changing.

The cotton quilting print I used had brightly-colored fish swimming on it. I didn't want the fish to be upside-down on one side of the bag, so I cut two pieces of fabric 5" x 9" for the side panels. (Karston still wears size 3 diapers and still weighs just above 18 pounds. You might need a larger size for a larger child.) I ironed interfacing on the back before cutting to give the bag some shape, to keep it from being floppy. It's often easier to work with interfaced fabric because it doesn't stretch while you're stitching.

For the zipper, I cut two 1.5" strips about 30" long, no interfacing. Using a very long, very loose stitches for machine basting, I sewed down the middle of the two long strips with right sides together. Next I ironed the strip so that only the right side of the fabric was showing, folding at the stitching. From my zipper spool, I cut off about 18" (for 15" of zipper use). I stitched the sides of the zipper face down onto the long strip, and then removed the machine basting stitches. Voila, perfect zipper casing! Next I sewed back and forth to bar-tack both ends of the zipper. Finally I stitched the long loose ends together where I had removed the basting but had no zipper, and bar tacked farther down the zipper for the little discrepancy area where I couldn't replace the basting but didn't need an opening for the zipper.

I carefully pinned the zipper track to one bag panel (wrong sides out, right sides facing), and stitched it so that one long side zipped open with equal amounts of zipper on the two short sides. Then I stitched the other panel to the other side of the zipper track to make a short rectangle.

And that's my One Hit Wonder, a single-use diaper bag for those short trips from home!

Then a few days later, I took some skinny fabric left over from cutting the zipper track, made a loop, and stitched (bar tacked) both sides of the loop down near the zipper slide (when closed). The attachment point is a lot like a belt loop (also called a carrier). Now when we're clipping toys to the car seat or the shopping cart cover, we can also clip the One Hit Wonder on the menagerie.

AVI to MOV

I wanted to upload a short movie of Karston, taken with a camera not a camcorder. I also wanted to trim off the first second of camera wobble, and maybe even add an explanatory caption. iMovie seemed the easiest way to do all of that, but it wouldn't import the AVI movie, so I needed to convert AVI to QuickTime MOV. Quick answer: install 3ivx and DivX Doctor II. Works like a charm!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Allergy

I used to think that I caught a cold about once every five years, and that when the doctor said allergies it was code for he didn't know.

I did some research on allergies after unexplained hives (my only known allergy is hives in reaction to cigarette smoke), and boy was I wrong! What I caught Tuesday night ten days ago (and I'm just now starting to shake it off) in Wisconsin is probably an allergy because my nose is running very thin and perfectly clear, and I don't have even the slightest fever. While I was fighting off the nasal drip cough, I thought, This is the same cold I always get that's so hard to shake. So the bad news is that I've had more allergies than I thought, although infrequently. But the good news, I suppose, is that I get colds less than one every five years.

After the nasal drip, I got another side effect that's probably more allergy: a rash on the side of my nose that looks like poison ivy. However, since I thought it was allergy this time, I just treated it like poison ivy, and this rash has never dried up so quickly!

Making diff work

This came up at work twice recently: sometimes diff fails badly. I tinkered with it for a while years ago, and found the answer: if the first lines in the two files fed to diff are not the same, diff says the files are completely different, even if the first line has the only change. So diff gets it right in all cases except a mis-match on the first lines. Keep that in mind if you think diff has gone crazy. (Try adding a blank line at the top.)

Python from cron

Problem: I was getting fatal errors from my cron script (Solaris bash) that calls a Python pexpect/telnet script, all about python: fatal: libX11.so.4: open failed. Of course there's no GUI with this shell script, so X11 doesn't seem necessary.

The shell script already exported PYTHONPATH pointing to pexpect's directory, all paths were absolute, and ldd python didn't show any missing libraries. Very frustrating, because of course the scripts work when I run them from the command line.

Solution: If it works when you launch it from the command line, but it doesn't work from cron, that means cron's minimal environment is (part of) the problem! The environment variables you get in cron are HOME, LOGNAME, PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin, and SHELL=/usr/bin/sh. This fix was to export LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the shell script called by cron, pointing to the directory with the python library of the fatal error, as quickly seen with ldd python. After all those conniptions, such a simple fix!

Morning Orange

The Madison Concourse Hotel has orange-scented and -colored soap and shampoo. I've decided that waking up to orange scent works for me. It's like having orange juice, without the acid that doesn't sit well on my stomach first thing. Of course, since this is Wisconsin, Kurtis peeled the soap and exclaimed, This is cheese soap!

Mmm, Salty Water

Ever since the Worldwide Spectrum Users Group Conference in charming Portsmouth, NH (fall 2003), I've been a water drinker. So I'm drinking water now at the Joint Techs conference in Madison, WI. Right on the bottle, it says "Source: Salineville, OH" -- mmm, salty water! It's regular bottled water (probably including that it's municipal water like most bottled water), but Salineville just doesn't sound like the place for your bottled water unless you like it salty.