Archive for 2006/06

On MotorsportReg.com, we store vehicle numbers as a string because every so often someone has a letter as part of their number. The problem with storing numbers as strings is that they sort poorly. Instead of “1, 2, 3… 10, 20, 30…” you are presented with “1, 10, 2, 20, 3, 30…”. [...]

What a nightmare. My longtime mail server lost power at the colo facility about a month ago and when it came back up, it only recognized one processor. It’s been bloody slow since so this weekend I went in with an extra gig of ram and two servers worth of spare parts to [...]

Back in the day of BBS’, one of the subcultures was called HPAV, or “Hack/Phreak/Anarchy/Virus”. Kids into “phreaking” would use various techniques to call around the world for free and one of their favorite pasttimes was setting up large-scale teleconferences. These conferences would sometimes last as long as a week. At that [...]

I went to Jennifer’s culinary school yesterday for lunch for the second time. Occasionally they can invite guests in exchange for a bottle of wine. The menu was an asparagus and fava bean salad, Beef Wellington and Crepe Suzette for dessert.
Beef Wellington is one of those things probably most people have [...]

This link came across on a mailing list I read this morning. Seems like you can get just about any magazine out there for $5.95/year. From Maxim to Catholic Digest. I would read the fine print; at this rate they are probably selling your information to other advertisers.

Since reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done“, I’ve been occasionally browsing some of the life hack sites that give you tips and ideas for implementing GTD. Lifehack.org fills my RSS reader up daily and I have saved about 50 of their posts for my own use. I had to post this one because [...]

Everyone has a tale of poor customer service. Usually it’s delivered with a cavalcade of profanity and met with an understanding nod. It is for this reason that I won’t relate my entire story, but I need to tell someone before my head explodes:
Comcast has missed 5 appointments in the past 10 [...]

The MySQL full-text engine is pretty impressive. It’s been around for a long time (since late 3.x versions) but I haven’t had the need to use it until a small project I was working on recently for a consulting customer. The default behavior is to use an algorithm to statistically determine the [...]