With all of the hubbub surrounding Google Office today I decided to write this blog post using Google Writely, which is an in-browser word processor that is part of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets service. It’s pretty nice so far, and I like that it has an autosave feature, because I’ve made use of it…
Month: February 2007
Um… Nevermind
Ok, so I’m publicly uncommitting myself from the project I committed myself to yesterday. Turns out, Mark Burgess has already done this with a tool called DeliciousSQL Importer. Sure, the data model doesn’t stand up to my rigorous normalization standards, but with this, I can get at my data, and do whatever I want with…
XSLT, SQL, and Delicious Library
Ok, I’m publicly committing myself to this pet project. I’m going to make it possible to take the data in Delicious Library’s xml backend and store it in a properly normalized database, so that other useful things can be done with the data. Here’s the quandry I find myself in: I have a good number…
I hate school buses
I know I’m probably a horrible person for hating school buses, but I do. I can’t help it. I hated them when I had to ride them to school, and now that I drive to work, I really can’t stand them. I realize there’s probably not another solution to the transportation issue. I’m just sayin’….
Safari isn’t that popular, and a neat Google search
Some number of *months* ago now, someone tried to justify my supporting Safari in a web application by saying “Safari is the most popular browser on the Mac”. That person further asserted that as Macs become more popular, Safari is also sure to become more popular. Now, I use a Mac, and I know lots…
How to replace a view, a cursor loop, and a few other queries with one SQL statement
I had a stored procedure that defined a cursor using a crazy query, and then a LOOP that did a FETCH and went row-by-row and performed updates and inserts to 3 or 4 different tables. I was having some trouble completing the very last thing the procedure needed to do. So I figured I’d take…
Shell Quoting Conundrum
Somebody on a mailing list asked a question about shell quoting. The quoting issue would not have been so difficult had it not been for the fact that it was a command that was to be run on the other end of an SSH connection. Here’s the command he was trying to run: ssh -t…
How to buy used voting machines on the internet
There’s a really interesting writeup by a Princeton University professor about how he was able to purchase a lot of voting machines on a government surplus site. Interesting highlights: the machine doesn’t match the marketing glossies with regard to “security” (surprise, surprise), and there’s no qualification process to go through to buy from the government…
Things to give your Sysadmin for Valentine’s Day
Ok, well, they don’t actually *make* any of these things, to my knowledge, but I was thinking about it today, and thought of this list of stuff that might be cool little thoughtful Valentine’s Day gifts for the geek in your life: A heart-shaped USB key that says “All my love are belong to you”…
Entering SQL Mode
My primary job focus is the design, deployment, maintenance, and support of infrastructure services like web, mail, dns, ntp, nfs, nis, ldap, print, and database servers (this is not to mention the routers and access points, sun rays, lab machines, beowulf clusters, etc that my group also maintains). However, recently I’ve been doing, well, some…