2007.06.28
The Tools we Use
It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
Continue reading "The Tools we Use"Last modified: Sunday, September 2, 2007 12:06 am
2007.06.21
The Double-Edged Sword of Proprietary Platforms
A recent
Slashdot article comment
wondered how Windows Vista managed to break existing applications,
despite Microsoft having complete control over the platform.
Continue reading "The Double-Edged Sword of Proprietary Platforms"Last modified: Thursday, June 21, 2007 11:28 am
2007.06.15
Handling Downtime
Ideally web sites should be up on a 24 by 7 basis.
This is however a difficult and often an expensive proposition.
Today I saw on the ACM Portal site
an innovative alternative.
Continue reading "Handling Downtime"Last modified: Friday, June 15, 2007 11:57 am
2007.06.06
Palindromic Palindrome Checking
Stan Kelly-Bootle's column in the April 2007
ACM Queue, titled
Ode or Code? — Programmers Be Mused!,
was as always very enjoyable.
However, I found its ending,
a C function that returns true when given a palindromic string
(e.g. ABCCBA), anticlimactic.
The function given is recursive; I was expecting it to be palindromic.
How difficult can it be to write such a function?
Continue reading "Palindromic Palindrome Checking"Last modified: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 6:43 pm