julius_geezer

11 ms·

61.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Wait, MySQL stores the field names with every record? Oracle doesn't do that; Postgres doesn't do that. The documentation I can pull up with five minutes of Googling strongly suggests that InnoDB doesn't do that. So as far as I know MRLCN's
62.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Larry Ellison worrying about people not liking him? I have the impression he revels in it.
63.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
If you can find a copy of Murray Kempton's _Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events_, there is an essay "The Confusions of Conscience" about just this. (I mention this mainly because the book is well worth having--the man had a way with a
64.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Tcl has always allowed one to set the variable 'b' to 'c' with set a b set $a c And while it took some getting used to, one could do it in a disciplined fashion, with a proc, and so create/set only certain variables in a calling proc. One d
65.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
I have only just aged out of the 45-54 range. In a very active month I might send a few more than 20; in a quieter month I might send fewer than 10.
66.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Barefoot walking is great. But I live in a climate where we get a snow or two most winters, and enough cold weather even without snow that a Zulu might be willing to risk his pedal health and put on shoes. I live in city that has broken gla
67.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Leisure is one thing that 1900-style riches bought. Winters on the Nile, summers or seasons in Europe, for example. Now for a great deal of humanity, leisure fairly quickly becomes boredom, and booze or philandering are required to maintain
68.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
It's definitely a regressive tax. Generally it offers worse odds than the numbers guys did back in the day. One could argue that it's better than legalizing casino gambling and inviting Steve Wynn to come into your state and help write the
69.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
One thinks of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", paragraph three: "That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. In the ten years that we have worked together, I can recal
70.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Rudyard Kipling wrote an entertaining story, "The Janeites." The characters in the story, for what it's worth, are not girls but rather officers and men of British battery at the front in 1917 or so.
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
I don't hate Lisp, I rather like when I encounter it. The only actual work use I've made of it was a command or two in Emacs Lisp years ago. On the other hand, I'm tepid toward JScript and dislike VBScript. But occasionally I have had to wr
72.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
During the Tokugawa shogunates, Japan aimed at maintaining a static society, and did a pretty fair job of it: contacts with the European world confined to Nagasaki, firearms excluded, etc. During about the same years, the Americans went fro
73.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Don't think I'll be buying the book. In any given week I have about about four stretches of continuous motion, either running or walking, last between 50 and 90 minutes. It is very seldom that I get the "can run forever" feeling that I some
74.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Aristotle said that drama is more philosophical than history, but (it seems to me) sometimes history may be more philosophical than philosophy, so, with an obvious American bias _The Federalist Era_ _The Machiavellian Moment_, J.G.A. Pocock
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
For another point of view: http://head-nurse.blogspot.com/2009/05/fuck-passion.html
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
As the sometime user of an Underwood manual typewriter, I have to say that I haven't hit cursor lag on a word processor since the days of WordPerfect 6.0, fourteen years ago. I should add that my typing speed was never really challenging th
77.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
"So "hate" is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about us." Only in the sense that "hate" is not too strong a word for how New Englanders feel about the New York Yankees: the hate is valid for the duration of conversa
78.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
"as an engineer, you are much more less likely to meet good look people during your work". Well, yes, if the bartender is in a college town. The drinking life does tend to wear on those who stay with it too long. The bartender might also be
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
For those who like this sort of essay, may I recommend S.J. Perelman? His "Cloudland Revisited" pieces, on the movies and books of his youth, are splendid.
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
"Aside from that, I'm curious how much of the reading list will be doable these days without a solid grasp of Greek or Latin or French ?" A whole hell of a lot. You could probably download better than 90% from gutenberg.org, though I am not
81.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
Plato! In his correspondence with Adams, they expend a great deal of abuse on Plato. Odd then, to find him commending the dialogues. Odd also to find such cold birds as Jefferson and Thoreau commending Anacreon. As for horses, face it, the
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
Back in the optimistic quarter century after WW II, this was probably quite common. A women with an expensive degree from a good school got to keep a household running, maybe typing theses for income, while a man, not necessarily better equ
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
The novelist Anthony Burgess once wrote about the convenience of the old British system of pence, shillings, pounds, and guineas: the pound was evenly divisible to a value in pence if not shillings by 2, 3, 5, and guinea also by 7.
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
Bookmark http://www.php.net/manual/en/ . I suspect that the quality of the code base will affect your happiness much more than the language itself will. I doubt that BigNameCorp belongs to the world where all database fields are VARCHAR(25
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
As much math and foreign languages as you can manage. Make sure that you achieve real competence in one of the languages. "He ... believed a competent person primarily has the ability to take things from one field of knowledge and apply the
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
Sure.
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
This is the perfect time of year to make your own. All you need is big box of seconds from the farm stand, a big pot, and a food mill. Cook it slow for several hours on one day, then run it through the mill. Next day, cook it down. Spices t
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
The MBAs get to lay off the engineers. The engineers' kids figure this out.
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by julius_geezer 16y ago
Which implies to me that Don found a minister in the lower quartile of Catholics, if not by training then by understanding. The feast is not about calendars but about commemoration, for all the winter-time staff that has accrued over the ye
90.
by julius_geezer 16y ago
"One stat that was particularly interesting, from a Stanford researcher whose name I forget, was that replacing the worst 6-10% of teachers would put us on the same proficiency level as Finland." Us = "the teachers" or "the US school system

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