Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: January 2014

  • Snow Storm Effect On Traffic

    Tuesday afternoon a bit of snow hit Georgia. We get them occasionally even down here in the southern United States. Usually they hit the mountains. Everywhere else, we just shut down for a few days. Unfortunately, we do not have all of our Atlanta schools on one system or all of our south Georgia schools…

  • Leading Zeros In A Batch Timestamp

    As “plumbers” for 17 databases and over a hundred application servers, we really do not have the time to sit there and watch them all. We design things so problems are pushed up to our attention. We are still getting point of predictive alerts to failures like we were on RHEL/Weblogic/Oracle, so usually we only…

  • Review: Starship Troopers

    Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein My rating: 4 of 5 stars The movie was satire of the book, right? The movie was campy (and as a woman told me just a reason to show boobs). The book reveals nuggets of insights about human nature within organizations. While I enjoyed both, I appreciate the book…

  • Review: An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

    An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths by Glenn Reynolds My rating: 2 of 5 stars On page 36 there is a quote about Athens, GA where I live about a wireless network downtown anyone can use. When I first moved here,…

  • Review: I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

    I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai My rating: 4 of 5 stars A memoir about growing up as a young girl in Swat of Pakistan. She explains life there both before and during Taliban involvement. I vaguely recall the news about her…

  • SQL Server Alias Naming Breaks Convert Function

    The vendor installs the application which includes creating the database and schema (SQL Server 2008 R2). The schema defined a certain column as varchar(128) that the application code expects to return an integer. If one of the entries for a client is a non-integer value, then HTTP 500 Internal Server Error failures prevent users from…

  • Lost Weight

    I suspect people are just being nice when they ask if I have lost weight. A normal person wants to and feels pleased when others notice. So it is a safe thing to ask. Except I do the mental calculations of when was the last time I saw the person, where I was on the…

  • Resolutions 2014

    Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. — Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Read 52 books. Yeah, I know. In 2011, 2012, and 2013, I read more than this. I like the number because it is a book a…