When to use a relational database: webapp file uploads
This post is the fourth in a series of arguments for using relational databases instead of, say, flat files. As I mentioned previously, I'm trying to steer c...
Tricksy textbookses. We hates them.
Eugene Wallingford of the University of Northern Iowa writes about teaching computer science and -- yawn -- marathon running. A posting of his dating from Ju...
What a professional computer course should be.
We've all enrolled in these: 3-day training courses on some fad software package or newfangled programming paradigm. I've taken 'em. I've taught 'em. I'd lik...
The infernal apostrophe. Or, why programmers loathe the Irish.
Do you blog using Wordpress? Have you tried adding a blogroll link that contains an apostrophe? Is it sometimes preceded by a visible backslash, and othertim...
Guests of “What He Said” stay at Yukon Forest Cabins
Carole and I spent our last pre-class weekend (actually, there's still one more to go, but that's the traditional "pre-class panic weekend") in a cabin just ...
Ubuntu with WPA Wi-Fi running on a Dell Inspiron 5160. Shoulda been easier, but coulda been impossible.
Now that Mac-inistas Mark Pilgrim, Cory Doctorow, and Tim Bray have made the leap to Ubuntu Linux, I thought it was high time to follow. Never able to afford...
15K Peacekeepers for Lebanon? Howzabout the Chinese?
Sorry for the gap in my posts of late; I was laid low by influenza. It was as if several dozen enraged short people were given leave to pummel me from foot t...
The. Most. Wonderful. Yukon. Web. Page. Evar.
Update, Feb 21, 2008: Alas, cheechakos.com no longer advertises the defunct restaurant; it now promotes art. And it does so in the same wonderful early-90s j...
Is Israel too “proportional” in its “measured” response?
Stephen Harper has taken some flack for describing Israel's response to the Hezbollah as "measured". I've also seen the word "proportional" bandied about. I'...
Compiler Ancestry
While compiling the compiler the other day on this very server, I had some time to think about compilation. The server's running Gentoo Linux, a BSD-like dis...
When the arrow keys stop working in Firefox.
I prefer to use the arrow keys to scroll while reading web pages. Every now and then, Firefox (version 1.5.0.5) stops responding to those keys. The Home and ...
How do you spell Queue?
We were exploring abstract data types one day in class, when a student looked up from his notes and asked, "How do you spell 'queue'?" "Oh that's easy," I an...