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Testing Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid
Disclaimer: you should do this on a computer you want to work on only if you like taking risk, since it very well break some things (and in fact it has for me – luckily I managed to work around the breakage). The process itself is pretty simple: You edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and replace occurances…
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The power of deduction – how information wants to be free
I find it amusing how people try to keep things secret, yet they talk about things which (rather directly) reveal the information they try to keep secret. Take for example the comments on this article (for my non-romanian speaking readers: it talks about the recent evolution of the EUR-RON exchange rate). One reader comments (approximately):…
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What is a rogue anti-spyware / anti-malware product?
Seeing how Kurt over at anti-virus-rants doesn’t yet have a definition for this, and I’ve just blogged about such a situation, I thought I take a shot at it. The definition of a rogue anti-spyware/anti-malware usually includes the following items: it is program which claims to be an anti-spyware / anti-malware product, however It has…
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Everything is grey
Nothing is black or white these days. Everything is grey (or gray for my US readers). Take for instance this year’s (2008) Virus Bulleting conference. The second larges sponsor (gold sponsor) is a company called ParetoLogic. Now if you look at their products page, you will see something called XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware. If you do a…
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Should we use English?
A friend of mine sent a link to a piece he’s written titled English as a global language, wherein he advocates that we should all learn one global language (probably English, given the current situation). While I don’t have such strong feelings about the matter, here are some of my thoughts: I produce content in…
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Technology microcosm – the reality distorsion field
We like to think that what we do is cool, hip and so on, but also that it is somewhat known and accepted within our social group. This came to my mind because I’ve just remembered some conversations I’d had at the workplace. My colleagues are about the same age as me and have or…
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Efficient SQL pagination method
The usual technique for displaying data from an SQL query as multiple web-pages involves the LIMIT/OFFSET clause. For example for the first page the query would look like something like: SELECT foo, bar, baz FROM ozz WHERE … ORDER BY … OFFSET 0 LIMIT 10 For the second page you would do: SELECT foo, bar,…
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Using Perl to access PostgreSQL under Windows
This appears by a non-intuitive problem for people. Below I assume that you are using some version of ActivePerl for Windows (5.8 or 5.10). First of all: Under no circumstances (ok, I rephrase: only under extreme circumstances) should you use DBD::PgPP. It is old, not very performant (given that its implemented in Pure Perl) and…
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Calling variable functions in Perl
What I’m trying to say with this title is the following: # … lets say we have a value $foo …. # … and we want to call method_1 method_2 … method_N on it foreach my $method_name (1..N) { $method_name = “method_$method_name”; my $func = *$method_name; my $result = &$func($foo); # … } The trick…
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Working with bitstrings in PostgreSQL
When working with short, fixed width binary data in PostgreSQL (for example: MD5/SHA1 hashes), an option to consider is the bitstring type. It has several advantages: Smaller data storage requirements (also – smaller index sizes). Storing an MD5 hash as characters representing hexadecimal numbers for example takes up 32 bytes, while storing it as bit…