Hypothesis: It’s better to park one’s car slightly on the left side of the parking spot. We will prove that the probability of a neighboring car’s door scratching your car is lower if in fact you religiously park on the left side of the parking spot. Moreover, we assume that the positioning is the only [...]
“Commercials are meant to make us feel like we’re missing things from our life.” I’ve heard this twice this last month, once during smalltalk with one of my colleagues, and again in an online clip. I have two problems with this assertion. The first problem is its reliance on paranoid thoughts akin to conspiracy theories. [...]
Fact: The whole blog concept is overrated! The main driving force of blogs is time-based entries. Blog is short for web log. Get it? Log. Journal. Date archives and calendars help easily locate log entries by date. Most blogs I’ve read, however, fall short of conveying meaningful date-oriented information. Web and journal don’t quite fit [...]
I came across a Java based blog and noticed a post about XML processing. It appears that the community around that blog is not familiar with the character encoding policies of the XML parsers available in Java. The fact of the matter is that the XML protocol has provisions for specifying the document encoding right [...]
In which I pick on the X in VARCHAR(X)… We’re all good at putting up a table in a relational database. We’re even better at guessing hard limits for the VARCHAR columns. But is it really such a good idea to put all those hard limits? I think software written for the future should not make assumptions [...]