dws's Journaldws's use Perl JournalTools hiding in plain sight- February 20, 2005 Years back I bought a solar powered calculator that does hex and octal. (Actually, I bought six, since they were on closeout sale for a couple of bucks each. I gave four to coworkers, and took one of the remaining two home.) Whenever I run into one of those bit pattern problems (like funky subnet masks), I reach for the calculator. This week, while working on some problem that required radix conversion, the teamate I was pairing with reached for... the Windows calculator. The words "but ..."..http://use.perl.org/~dws/journal/23262?from=rss Time flies like a banana- February 18, 2005 “Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.” — John Wheeler No, Time is nature's way to keep everything wrong from happening all at once. And right now, nature needs some debugging. While waiting to hear from the Volkswagen dealer about whether they could get the part they needed to start fixing the car (toxic fumes out of the heater vents--it's what's for breakfast!), my cell phone took a dive into a puddle. After missing the train. While recovering.http://use.perl.org/~dws/journal/23247?from=rss Overheard in passing- February 13, 2005 Outside the neighborhood coffee shop. Two guys in their 70's, one wearing a flannel shirt and a straw hat. The other carrying a walking stick. The fellow with the hat is speaking."You need a switch, not a hub." I love living in Silicon Valley.http://use.perl.org/~dws/journal/23168?from=rss That other kind of JOIN- February 13, 2005 I've been doing database-related work for most of the last 15+ years, yet last week was only the second time I've needed to use a FULL OUTER JOIN in production code. We use LEFT JOIN as an interview question to gauge a candidate's knowledge of SQL, but this was one of those "we may get some from here, we may get some from there, but we need to count either as one" situations (with a few twists) were a LEFT JOIN wasn't sufficient, and I didn't want to introduce additional queries into this...http://use.perl.org/~dws/journal/23167?from=rss Weekend Archaeology- February 6, 2005 This weekend I bought a bunch of mid-sized plastic tubs from the local storage place, and went on a cleaning binge in my study. Amoung the random things uncovered were the receipts for the 300Mhz Celeron box I built in '99 "to carry me into the next century". The receipt noted $190 USD for an 8Gb Maxtor drive. Last week I picked up 160Gb for $60. That's $25Gb to <$0.50Gb in 6 years. Not bad. The plastic tubs are clear, so it'll be easier to find stuff in the closet. So far I have one tub...http://use.perl.org/~dws/journal/23055?from=rss |