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Converting rows (records) to and from arrays in Postgres
Arrays are one of those more special features in PostgreSQL. Like any more esoteric features, you have people both in favor and opposed to them. On the pro side you have the fact that you can have an arbitrary number of elements without wasting space and/or having cumbersome table structure. On the con side you…
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Random links and commentary
From the Mechanix blog comes the tale of the blocking CREATE INDEX call under PostgreSQL – I consider myself lucky that the databases I run are of internal use and I can permit myself to take them offline for a couple of minutes. Via use Perl;: comments in the Perl debugger. Reminds me of the…
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An argument (against) PHP
Via Perlbuzz I landed at the blog posting An Argument for PHP, which I disagree with. First a little about my background: I’ve been programming in PHP almost twice as long (6+ years) as in Perl, so (hopefully) it isn’t the case that I don’t know what I’m talking about. PHP seemed nice and shiny…
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Dynamic languages, the universe and everything
From Planet Perl I somehow ended up at a transcript of a talk about dynamic languages. It just so happens that during the same time I was reading the paper Eudaemon: Involuntary and On-Demand Emulation Against Zero-Day Exploits. The paper is an extension of the Argos project, which tries to identify zero-days by correlating network…
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Luminous CD envelopes
While reading the Luminous band-aids post over at the Universe of Disclosure blog, I was reminded of a similar event with a CD envelope a couple of years ago (the kind CD’s attached in magazines, with a round plastic window in the middle). I was opening it in the semi-dark (the kind of don’t wake…
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Advanced MySQL features
I think usually of MySQL as a simpler alternative to more feature rich RDBMS’s like Postgres. However recently I listened to an interview with Brian Moon, the author of Phorum which is the oldest PHP and MySQL based forum software. The interview was very cool and demonstrated that you can do a lot if you…
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An inspirational song
I don’t like baseball all that much (it isn’t played very often on this part of the ocean), but I find the song by Kenny Rogers very inspiring. The story behind the song seems to be (according to Wikipedia) that a baseball player named Kenny Rogers (not to be confused with the country singer –…
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A (not so new) technique for breaking databases
There is joke which goes something like: those who know how to do it, do it. Those who don’t, teach it. Those who don’t even know how to teach it, supervise it. Sadly this is true for many tech journalists who make up sensationalized titles both because of lack of comprehension and because they have…
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You must be ye high to play
I would be for my readers indulgence, but here is an other philosophical post. Recently I had the chance to try to teach somebody make dynamic websites and I realized that you must know an awful lot to do this. Just to enumerate a couple of things: (X)HTML CSS – which is by no means…
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All the perl documentation
A quick note: When I talked earlier about turning off warnings in Perl, I referenced the perldiag page. If you wish to see a list of all the perl… documentation available, you can look at the language reference at perldoc.perl.org (there is also a 5.8.8 version if you haven’t upgraded yet, although the differences should…