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"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"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"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"Navigation
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Recent Posts
Was Knuth Really Framed by Jon Bentley? (2020-02-25)
Convert file I/O into pipe I/O with /dev/fd (2019-12-14)
Pia Betton on Service Design (2019-12-05)
How to monitor MySQL / MariaDB query progress (2019-11-03)
So, you're chairing a conference session? (2019-05-29)
Java Stream Methods and Unix Pipeline Commands: A Dictionary (2018-11-27)
Debugging had to be discovered! (2018-11-16)
How I slashed a SQL query runtime from 380 hours to 12 with two Unix commands (2018-08-05)
How to Perform Set Operations on Terabyte Files (2018-04-03)
The Shoemaker's Children Go Barefoot (2018-02-10)
Convert file I/O into pipe I/O with /dev/fd (2019-12-14)
Pia Betton on Service Design (2019-12-05)
How to monitor MySQL / MariaDB query progress (2019-11-03)
So, you're chairing a conference session? (2019-05-29)
Java Stream Methods and Unix Pipeline Commands: A Dictionary (2018-11-27)
Debugging had to be discovered! (2018-11-16)
How I slashed a SQL query runtime from 380 hours to 12 with two Unix commands (2018-08-05)
How to Perform Set Operations on Terabyte Files (2018-04-03)
The Shoemaker's Children Go Barefoot (2018-02-10)
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