Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Secure This - Worse Than Failure
Read the whole thing. This is one the most succinct summary of how website "security" usually works that I have ever seen.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Six Objections to the Westphall Hypothesis
The argument for this claim, what I’ll call the Westphall Hypothesis, is based around a rather impressive bit of research about crossovers in TV-land. (The site seems to be based in Victoria, so I have some natural fondness for it.) The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of St. Elsewhere revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to St. Elsewhere in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.
It’s a nice little idea, but there are half a dozen things wrong with it.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Subtraction: If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software
Subtraction: If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software: "It’s just perfect that Lotus Notes, an application whose awkward integration of multiple feature sets I’ve only ever heard spoken about with violent disgust, promotes itself as freakish software. As if frightening, cross-species aberrations of nature are what we’ve all been looking for in an email and calendaring solution. This is a campaign that can only make sense in the intensely inward-looking world of enterprise software."
wanted: family tree of database products
Boning up on Hibernate and JPA, makes me think about the history of relational databases.
Facts like these can be gleaned from sources such as Wikipedia:
Ingres begat Postgres.
Sybase was originally a clone of Ingres.
MS-SQL server came from Sybase.
Oracle may have initially been a clone of IBM System R.
Informix came out of nowhere.
What I'd like to find is a nice genealogical chart of all this stuff, like the unix timeline, or the computer languages history.
Facts like these can be gleaned from sources such as Wikipedia:
Ingres begat Postgres.
Sybase was originally a clone of Ingres.
MS-SQL server came from Sybase.
Oracle may have initially been a clone of IBM System R.
Informix came out of nowhere.
What I'd like to find is a nice genealogical chart of all this stuff, like the unix timeline, or the computer languages history.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
I've just now upgraded my Acrobat reader from version 7 to version 8.
Four years after this was written, very little has happened to invalidate this article.
Four years after this was written, very little has happened to invalidate this article.
Monday, October 22, 2007
i can't believe i ate the whole thing
On the way to the office, I stopped and bought eight Krystals, intending to put them in the fridge here at work for later. Now, about 45 minutes later, I stare at the last remaining portion of the last remaining Krystal.
This does not bode well for the kind of day I'm likely to have now.
This does not bode well for the kind of day I'm likely to have now.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
quote of the day
"If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits." -- Michael Moorcock
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
work/life email balance
I am noticeably more sane and less stressed than I was circa six months ago. What has changed? Several things, but the most important is that I no longer check work email when I'm not working.
Friday, October 05, 2007
FAKE DOCTORS NOTES
wtf?
