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Sunday, April 13, 2003 |
Solution Still Unsatisfactory. If you aren't a reasonably hardcore science fiction fan, be warned: this post won't make much sense to you. Still here? Well, you were warned. Patrick Nielsen Hayden points out Bill Humphries' observation that since 9/11, we appear to be... [The Truth Laid Bear]
This is an interesting post on Elgin's site, but what makes it really interesting is the way some reply to it. Instead of replying to what he said, a certain Tom T. does a "translation" of the comments into very unfavorable terms, and comments on that "translation" instead. Very strange.
But in any case, the recommendations of the Ken McLeod novels are very apposite. I've only read one of the novels, and need to get at more of them.
2:07:20 PM Permalink
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Firefly Coming to DVD [Slashdot]
Like the Slashdot commentator says, it's funny that Fox couldn't find enough viewers for this on TV, but they think they can sell a DVD. I miss this show; it was terrific, but didn't last long enough. Having unseen episodes will be great, too.
1:06:48 PM Permalink
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The Hundred Year Language. It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Today I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?
How far will this flattening of data structures go? I can think of possibilities that shock even me, with my conscientiously broadened mind. Will we get rid of arrays, for example? After all, they're just a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of integers. Will we replace hash tables themselves with lists?
[PHP Everywhere]
12:53:13 PM Permalink
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Hate SQL? Not me.
On Hating SQL.
Kind of an interesting piece, but it gives no reason for "hating" SQL, and spends most of its time talking about the great work that's being done on SQL. The only comments on SQL are that it "revolts" and "makes me grumpy" and that it's "damn ugly stuff." I was interested in reading the short piece, but I got zip out of it.
I have a love/hate relationship with SQL myself. Love/hate is not quite the right word for it. Declarative langauges, like SQL and XSLT are frustrating sometimes in the lack of control you have over how they go about doing their work. Both are limited in things like dealing with the user and dealing with items outside their own domain (such as the file system). In SQL, the lack of a standard around a procedural wrapper for the querying part of the language is frustrating, as is the lack of standard (and sometimes lack of the feature all together) for stored procedures (which includes triggers and defined functions).
My big complaint lately is the problem of getting XML out of mySQL. I like the XML support in SQL Server quite a bit, but again that's a non-standard. Relational databases are great for storing one-to-many relationships, and XML is a great way to express these relationships, but when you query SQL you get pretty much flat tables with lots of duplicate data, which is hard to turn into hierarchic XML (at least, without the Microsoft "for XML" clause, which is great).
But I have a lot to learn about this stuff
12:04:21 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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