Archive for April, 2009

“A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.” — ABC News… »

A very intriguing article by William Marling, a visiting professor of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, relating how books and other media are systematically banned in Lebanon by an outdated and ignorant censorship system, even though Beirut was named “World Book Capital City” in… »

Who decides what is “stupid” and what is not? Who decides who the Web should cater for? Who says what should appear on the Web and what is “meaningless” to put out there? A new book, “Stupedia” claims to be the authority on the… »

The World Digital Library website opened as promised on April 21st. It features a very elegant and more or less intuitive user interface. The content is scarce for now, but quite… »

Thanks to my friend Alex who shared this link with me. It’s as sad as it is entertaining. The problem that I can’t figure out is who’s fault is it? Is it Greenspan? September 11? Capitalism? Smoking Homeowners? Mortgage Brokers? Wall Street? Investors?
Who to blame?

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo
Website: http://crisisofcredit.com/
Related… »

Motivation
Logging is an essential feature in any software, be it during development or after release to production. One feature that I found lacking in Oracle PL/SQL is a portable, built-in facility to help developers track execution times of blocks of code/SQL.
I found that SQL*PLUS has some built-in functions that provide support for timing queries and… »

I can’t remember having heard so much about presents exchanged between world presidents in a long while. In fact I think that some of the gifts that were recently exchanged with Barack Obama will make history, like other famous gifts that made history, such as the Statue of Liberty and the head of John the… »

This guy never stops surprising me. I have first noticed him when he appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart back in September 25, 2007 (see clip below). He was elected as the first indigenous (Aymara Indian) president of Bolivia in December of 2005. One of the most striking things about him is that… »

April 7 2009 was the night of the first ladies on Comedy central.
First, Jon Stewart in his Daily Show hosted Jehan Sadat, the wife of assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. 30 minutes later, Stephen Colbert was hosting Queen Noor on his Colbert Report, the wife of late King Hussein of Jordan. What was going on… »

came across this new project under the apache umbrella, dubbed Hive, related to the hadoop initiative which implements a data warehouse infrastructure that takes advantage of the core MapReduce hadoop libraries to create a query execution engine for large scale data processing.
The project is still in its early development stages, but the idea sounds… »