Technology

BackupSynchronizer: a Simple Directory Backup and Synchronization Script in Python

By robert
This post contains code written in Python

As a first exercise in Python, I decided to create a directory backup script. Here’s the resulting… »

Joel on Software

By robert
Joel on Software: and on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

In this book, Joel Spolsky is an iconoclast par excellence. He relentlessly refutes many of the absurdly sacred tenants that are touted by many software developers as absolute truths, in his down-to-earth tell-it-like-it-is… »

WP Hide Post: Wordpress Plugin

By robert

The WP Hide Post plugin enables the author to write posts/pages that are hidden on the homepage, feeds and/or other places, but still visible to search engines. This is a great tool for… »

900GB USB Drive

By robert
USB 2.0 with 900GB of Storage

A friend of mine went to China recently and brought back a SONY, VAIO-branded USB 2.0 drive with a startling 900GB… »

Wolfram|Alpha Computational Search Engine

By robert
Mathematica for the laymen

Wolfram|Alpha, a “Computational Search Engine”, will launch on May 18, giving people access to a wealth of “computable” facts and algorithms. It takes queries in simple English and produces all sorts of results in the form of tables, charts and diagrams…. »

Google Maps Alphabet

By robert
Sites Showing Letters of the Alphabet

An interesting effort from Australia to locate the 26-letter English alphabet on Google… »

Google Goats

By robert
Goats Grazing outside the Googleplex

Google Inc. has hired 200 goats to graze its fields to eat grass and weeds and to fertilize the soil as a low-carbon alternative to mowing… »

Go Chrome… and Never Look Back

By robert

Once I tried the Google Chrome browser I was impressed with its speed and lightweight impact on the system resources. In spite of the essential features that it still lacks, it’s currently my default… »

Timing Queries and Scripts in PL/SQL

By robert

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… »

HIVE: a Data Warehousing Framework on top of hadoop

By robert
hadoop

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… »