Update Feb 7: SQLite dynamic table support is now in the SQLObject trunk — so, version 0.7.4 should support this. The current version of SQLObject has this nice ability to automatically build classes from the tables that already exist in the database. All you have to do is set the fromDatabase variable in sqlmeta to [...]

Both Org Mode and Planner Mode are really neat ways to maintain a schedule, and almost sufficient reason to use Emacs in and of themselves. I’ve tried them both, and have found that Org Mode integrates easier with the way that I prefer to work. Make sure you see the Org Tutorial and the excellent [...]

Spotted on an old GNU software page: There have been many changes from the older versions of Emacs, 19.x, and 20.x to the latest versions, 21.x. These changes have been made in two main areas: Bug fixes, and updates. Additional features, and functionality. Let’s see… bug fixes and features. Yes, that would pretty much cover [...]

Came across an interesting link on reddit today that claimed that you could store 256GB on an A4 piece of paper. My first reaction was: holy crap, what a great idea! I was all set to write a version up. But then you look at the numbers, and it starts to look less feasible. Taking [...]

I happened across the Shortest Sudoku Solver page, which has programs in various languages that solve the puzzle. Most of the major scripting languages clock in at anywhere from 100 to 200 characters. It means nothing, of course — it’s just elaborate puzzle solving. The C program is just about as short as Python, for [...]

Quick, an Ocaml quiz: What is the best way to write a summation function? [code lang='ocaml'] let sum a = List.fold_left (fun x total -> x+total) 0 a [/code] or [code lang='ocaml'] let sum a = List.fold_right (fun x total -> x+total) a 0 [/code] – What is the best way to write this function? [...]

I decided to get a dedicated server for my project and passion of the moment (more on that later, maybe). As a result, I wanted to set up a CentOS installation so that I could work out all the bugs before uploading. Unfortunately, it turns out that getting CentOS working on a USB drive is [...]

I’m really excited to be able to talk about CSVTL, because I believe it’s the next big thing, and it’s been in the works for several years. History Basically, I had been in contact with one of my old high-school friends high up in the W3C working group. I had always wanted to join one [...]

Having been using Python for a while, I am fully enamored of the language. It is elegant, easy to read, and wonderfully descriptive. The only drawback is a serious case of the slows, but I am hoping that this will be fixed eventually. When I think of all the time I spent writing Java, it [...]

I do love Gentoo, often more than is seemly, but sometimes I don’t want to spend half a day or so compiling everything. So, I installed Dapper on my new box at work. Everything looked great, and the Gnome desktop is certainly nice if a bit of a memory hog compared to XFCE… … but [...]

I bought an external hard drive to back up a bunch of stuff that I have laying around on computers. I purchased the Seagate 200GB Firewire drive because a) Techbargains pointed out that there was a sale on them and b) I neglected to read the reviews on CNet. That said, the drive seems fast [...]

Sometimes, something works so well and so invisibly that is just makes you kind of chortle with glee whenever you use it. My Gentoo box has become my primary workstation — nowadays, I am using my Windows box only for games and iTunes. Each has a separate monitor, so I can see what is going [...]

Discussions of superluminal communication and the paradoxes raised therein always involved unsatisfying (to me) examples about space ships and Andromeda and impending doom, but it turns out that the (real) paradoxes raised by superluminal communication can be easily merged with the Barn Paradox. The Barn Paradox Assume an Olympic-level sprinter with a 20m pole that, [...]

My Audiovox 5600 committed suicide the other day. It was on the table, someone called, vibrate was on, so it jostled itself right off the table to a horrible death and a cracked screen. Of course, I both mourned and cheered — mourned because I’d have to set up another phone, but cheered because I [...]

I am proposing something that is both a cultural and a punctuation change. I do this not for the hopes of profit or fame, but instead, for the good of people everywhere. I think that instead of having people stressing over the exact wording of something, we instead allow: [[Statement of actual message]] Upon reading [...]

So, I’ve mentioned before that my old sports car is sitting in my driveway. It attracts a note or two each week from the teenage boys that lust after the car. Recently I got a note on the car: I was tempted to call him and complain about his punctuation, but I decided not to [...]

Spent the good part of today trying to clear my laptop of a virus that wasn’t being caught by Norton or any other anti-virus program that I tried. In the hopes of saving someone some time, I put them here into the Google-mind. Symptoms: Extra processes THEWMPCD.EXE and ROUCCONF.EXE in the task list. The processes [...]

Switched this over to WordPress 1.5. There’s an old joke about a programmer that decides to write a book, so he goes through and buys a printing press, selects the typeface, buys a binding machine, searches the world over for just the right paper with just the right color, and after getting all of that [...]

I am making this in the hopes that I can save someone else some time, and also in case I ever need to do this again. I’m loving the Gentoo setup, now that I’ve got it — it’s very fast and lean — but it was a pain to set up, and took me three [...]

I was just reminded of one of the horrible anti-patterns I’ve seen in working with a template library that will remain nameless. At a previous company we called it “text subclassing.” It’s what we called it when you had to copy huge pieces of text out of a superclass and paste it into your subclass. [...]