lol… watching a conservative radio talk show host learn firsthand that waterboarding IS torture: http://tinyurl.com/qx2shf
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In other news, I just watched Glee. Not perfect, but there’s genius in this show. So Fox will probably cancel it soon 😉
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There’s a really cool diff class hosted by Google here:
http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/
I’ve used it on a few web sites where it is necessary to compare versions of the same text.
But now I want to integrate that functionality into Excel 2003. Unfortunately, Excel 2003 only understands VBA, not JavaScript. So, here’s the convoluted path I’m exploring:
– Have my users install ExcelDna (http://www.codeplex.com/exceldna), an open-source Excel add-in that allows execution of .
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As a systems architect in a non-medical but equally complicated field, I’ve been incredulous about Obama’s plan for a “paperless” healthcare system. I agree there’s a huge *need* for such a change, but throwing $20 billion at this without a cohesive, common, open data model would be a complete waste of money.
Turns out I’m not alone in my opinion, and this guy knows a lot more about the problem than I do–he almost died from it:
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Originally posted 2004-02-18, part of my slow effort to convert old dasBlog content to WordPress.
On the big argument going around about the use of identity() fields as surrogate primary keys, I’ll just make a few comments from my own experience. My overall opinion: in a real-world system, your list of candidate keys is constantly being reduced, and composition required to generate uniqueness is constantly increasing. If you start using a natural candidate key, you might as well plan on redefining the PK at some point in the future, period.
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Note: Originally posted on 2004-02-17 under the permalink 4aa1a488-fa83-4df5-83e8-a2b218e75d75… someone requested that this one be resurrected from the archives. Someday I’ll write a script to convert all that old content to WordPress! *sigh*
Marc Shiker has seen the light on how to address the issue of lookup tables.
The problem here is not one of identities primary key vs. storing the value, it is one of whether you should have a relation in the first place.
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(This was originally written in May 2006, recovered from the archives of my old blog… my opinion has not changed.)
So, rather than spending time developing software we actually need, Microsoft is coming up with their own proprietary “competitor” to the JPEG format. Some lame photographer hack was quoted on ZDNet as being in favor of Microsoft’s newest attempt to lock us into their data formats, so here’s the opinion of a programmer/photographer who has actually read the spec.
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Wow. Joe Rogan went off on Kellog’s, saying pretty much what I thought (but from my non-stoner viewpoint) about their grandstanding against Michael Phelps.
http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/454
(warning: language)
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Apple usually hits the nail on the head when it comes to usability, but iCal just plain sucks. The user interface is completely unusuable, even for adding simple calendar items.
Turns out, the calendar app I enjoy using the _most_Â is Google Calendar, followed by Outlook.
Apple, with all their slick UI frameworks and latte-sipping HCI engineers, is simply _years behind_ the free web-based app from Google and almost as far behind Microsoft’s old and crusty email application.
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As a PK, I moved around a LOT when I was a child. A few nights ago, I had the sudden desire to look up all of our old childhood homes, plus the places I’ve lived as an adult, and make a map of them in Google Maps.
Call it nostalgia or whatever, it’s just cool to reach back into the deep cobwebs and try to remember something basic like “where I used to live,” and then to see the old homestead via Google Street View.
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