Category Archives: uncategorized

Slashdot asks: Are Relational Databases Obsolete?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, you idiot. Don’t be such an idiot.

A Brief History of Ugly: Apple in the last 10 years
I must take exception with his assertions that the iMac G5, the original iBook, and the eMate 300 were ugly. The iMac G5 is striking, the original iBook was breathtaking, and the eMate 300 was astonishingly unique.

Service Scrubber:
This could come in handy.

Also potentially useful: ThisService.

Insomnia:

Despite the occasional foul language, I love xkcd. I don’t know why, but every comic makes me laugh (especially the recent “River Tam Beats Up Everyone”).

‘What will your obituary say?’ at QuizGalaxy.com

Doesn’t seem accurate somehow. Especially the Paris Hilton thing. She won’t actually miss me that much. Although the hysterical laughter thing? That might be right.

In reality, I want my tombstone to say, “I told you I was sick.”

It’s moments like these when I’m proud to be an American.

Amen.

Great hint here on how to customize the date and time formats allowed in Numbers ’08. I added YYYY-MM-DD for my SQL work. Beautiful.

I have to say that Numbers is a fantastic spreadsheet. The only major flaw I’ve found so far is the lack of a TEXT function, which I often use in Excel to pad data with leading zeroes.

Todd Ogasawara writes: Apple iWork ‘08 is available now and can read/write Office 2007 files. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. It costs $79. I don’t think Office for Mac 2008 for Mac will be $79 (will it come in a bazillion versions like Office for Windows?). I’ve never used iWork but will guess it doesn’t support macros (big deal since Office won’t either).

Right on, Todd. Right on. I’ve been playing with the Numbers ’08 trial and it’s a lot of fun.

Dan writes: Honestly, I don’t know if this can be stopped. It sure as won’t be stopped by electing a different puppet into the White House… that whole process is just another form of distraction, another form of our own disempowerment. Especially this time around… just look at how Hollywood-esque this election is turning out to be.

That’s fine and all, but there’s a far greater threat looming that Dan seems to be ignoring (related Slashdot discussion here).

John Gruber is spot on, cheap once again:

Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, cialis interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages. Don’t quote anything at all from the original message if you don’t have to.

Top posting drives me crazy.

No, I haven’t. This greeting card spam is really getting annoying. I’m getting bombarded with this stuff.

That is all.

PostgreSQL first real benchmark has been published:

This publication shows that a properly tuned PostgreSQL is not only as fast or faster than MySQL, but almost as fast as Oracle (since the hardware platforms are different, it’s hard to compare directly). This is something we’ve been saying for the last 2 years, and now we can prove it.

For open source database nuts, this is awesome news. PostgreSQL has had a more mature feature set than MySQL for years, and now they have a faster database to boot. Throw in the far less restrictive BSD license, and I see no reason whatsoever to use MySQL for any serious application.

The fine folks at ars technica report on a survey that says folksonomy is the most hated word on the internet. The rest of the list:
Blogosphere
Blog
Netiquette
Blook
Webinar
Vlog
Social Networking
Cookie
Wiki

Obviously I was not consulted. I would have blogosphere at the top of the list, surrounded by BLINK tags. Don’t get me wrong. Folksonomy is a decidedly stupid word, but not nearly as bad as blogosphere.

As for the others, well, blog isn’t so bad. I initially preferred weblog, but I’ve caught myself saying blog more than a few times now. Netiquette I can deal with. At least it’s been around for a while. I don’t know what a blook is. A book written in a blog? No idea. Webinar is completely moronic. Just utterly and completely moronic. Nothing redeeming about it whatsoever. Social Networking I can deal with. Sure, it’s overrated and overblown, but at least it’s not a made up word. On the other hand, I always thought cookie was a stupid word, at least as it applies to web technology. As for wiki, well, don’t get me started.

If you question my authority in judging these words, know that I am a technology professional and a certified English teacher.