Answer My Searches

I was querying a table from FileMaker using DB Visualizer via JDBC/ODBC and I kept seeing error messages like this one:

Error getting value for: 19037/4: com.filemaker.jdbc.FMSQLException: [FileMaker][FileMaker JDBC] For input string: "?": ?

I couldn’t figure out a good way to prevent it, so I looked at the row in the results it was mentioning e.g., 19037, then looked up the corresponding record in FileMaker, and noticed it had “?” instead of numbers in a number field. So I replaced the “?” with 0 and now it seems to work.

I sealed my deck for the first time today. Here are some things I’d wish I’d known, or that you should know:

• I used Thompson’s WaterSeal – Waterproofer plus clear wood protector.
• It’s not really clear, it made the deck quite dark.
• It needs 48 hours to dry and the nighttime low can’t go below 50 degrees Fahrenheit so watch the weather carefully.
• I tried to use as little as possible but it still took 3 gallons to cover my 400-500 square foot deck. (The can said I’d only need 1.5 gallons)
• Wear dish gloves, it will get on your hands and it’s hard to get off.
• Buy an 8 dollar garden sprayer, I used it at the end but it would have saved me 4 hours, and it lets you apply a thinner coat.
• Have mineral spirits (or paint thinner) on hand to clean up.
• KEEP sealer far away from siding, don’t spray near siding. Now I need to figure out how to get it off the siding I think I’ll tape newspaper over the siding next time.
• Spray towards deck if you have a choice, that way excess spray will coat the deck.

Just a dumb mistake I made that I thought I’d mention.

I was getting this Django template error after I changed a datetime model field to a date model field:

Caught AttributeError while rendering: 'datetime.date' object has no attribute 'date'

Well, it turns out I had left the Django field as models.DateTimeField. Once I actually switched it to models.DateField, everything worked fine.

I downloaded this file (SRR074287) and wanted to convert it to FASTQ format.

I downloaded the SRA toolkit and extracted it to a directory in my home directory. However when I tried to run it I got this error:

$ ~/sratoolkit.2.1.2-centos_linux64/fastq-dump -A SRR074287
2011-08-22T15:00:16 fastq-dump.2.1.2 err: table not found while opening manager within database module - failed to open 'SRR074287'

After some trial and error, running it like this seems to work:

$ ~/sratoolkit.2.1.2-centos_linux64/fastq-dump SRR074288.sra

There is some documentation here, but it didn’t really explain what I did wrong, or why running it with the filename works.

I was trying to make a FileMaker script to do a find using variables, and then omit records from that find via other criteria.

I kept trying to use the “constrain found set” statement to no avail!

Finally I tried putting the “constrain found set” statement AFTER the “perform find” statement and that seemed to make it work.

So the moral is “constrain found set” goes AFTER “perform_find”!