(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 …

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 …

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 …

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!

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 …

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.)

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 …

I have Acronis TrueImage, which got good reviews from PC Mag, as my backup software, running against a Maxtor OneTouch over USB 2.0. It's insanely slow: an incremental backup of my data partition takes more than a day. The partition is big (200G) but the delta is some small …

The Netflix optimization challenge exemplifies a situation for which there should be a solution, but which I've not seen a good answer. Namely: for-profit but initially ad-hoc cooperation. For instance, let's just say that I made the case that a Pandora-like "Movie Genome Project" was the key to winning …

Scott Swigart points to this article that gives a non-technical overview of the use of genetic algorithms to determine the optimal tuning characteristics of one's Linux Kernel. This ought to work: many years ago I wrote a genetic algorithm that tuned the optimization parameters of one's C++ compiler and it …