Don't Believe Earthquake "War Zone" News Coverage!

CNN is incredibly over-dramatizing the situation in Kona. They are getting over-wound-up quotes from people who are saying "like a war zone." This is not true!

One of the "highway blockages" is 100 yards from my house -- it's a couple big rocks in the road. Too big for a person …

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Earthquake trashed interior, but safe and no significant structural damage

That sucked. We're directly onshore from the epicenter, as we understand it.

We're okay, though, and the house (pretty incredibly, given the experience) doesn't seem to have any structural damage. Much more extensive blog posting to come.

Power is on (for the moment?) and water is back on.

On Queen …

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You Call That A Nuke?

I absolutely love that what's playing out re. Korea, which presumably expended approximately 1/6 of its enriched uranium on Sunday, is "Geez, I don't know. If you did, mighty impressive. But, y'know, if I were Iran, I wouldn't buy anything from you on the basis of that. Maybe you'd …

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Explicit Typing, Trail Blazing, and Packrat Parsing

(Warning / Reassurance: this is not a technical post on how to use packrat parsing to evaluate type declarations.)

Steve Yegge calls this image a "treatise on non-inferring static type systems...one of the most insightful Computer Science papers ever published":

He then goes on to say "[Different styles are] perfectly …

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Anthony (6) Programs A Game

This is a great story about teaching Anthony to program his first game. An earlier post echoes my own thoughts on how fortunate my generation is to have been exposed to computers at a time when typing in a simple game was part and parcel of learning to use the …

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Vista Server Core

Scott Swigart describes Vista Server Core, a GUI-less version of Vista. While I quite like the idea (not just for resources, but because a purely command-line driven server facilitates a shift towards scripting repetitive tasks), there is a deep irony that this version of Vista does not support the .NET …

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Gray Goo Assault On Second Life

I hardly know what Second Life is (even though smart people think it's important), but I love the fact that it's being assaulted by gray goo. Bring on the New Victorians!

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Database Refactoring: RedGate's SQL Dependency Tracker First Impression

Based on people commenting on my previous post, it looks like RedGate kind of "owns" the database-refactoring tools market. I downloaded the 14-day trial of SQL Dependency Tracker. It gives an excellent first impression: not a wizard interface, but very obvious how to start.

After you point it at your …

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Bears Repeating: Hard To Test == Code Smell

Curtis Poe (via Patrick Logan):  [I]f you find something is hard to test, that's a code smell.

(I just spent minutes confirming that it's "bears repeating" and not "bares repeating." Both bring up funny mental images.)

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Database Refactoring Is Hard

I am facing the task of refactoring a database whose structure has accreted through the years. Table names like "Foo" and "FooX." Something like 20 tables that have no records (those are easy to scratch), others that have virtually the same columns and yet which each have thousands of records …

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