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Editor’s note: This was originally published on March 16, 2008. Back in 1999, someone showed me an early Palm Pilot PDA. I was hooked immediately and bought my own a few days later. In those days, a Palm PDA was had a lot of deficiencies. Memory was limited to about 8MB, the screen was a…
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January of 2008. Some of it still makes sense and some of it doesn’t. Back in the MS-DOS days, getting a new computer was easy. Not only was your new computer strikingly faster than what you had, but moving your work was just a matter of copying…
Goofus and Gallant grew up to be software developers. Gallant is a consummate professional. He studies project requirements carefully, asks a lot of questions, and spends plenty of time planning his approach before he starts programming. Gallant says that getting things right up front will save a lot of time in the long run. Goofus…
Once upon a time, real programmers wrote code. We had a computer, a C compiler, and a couple of books full of algorithms. The books never had all the answers so we invented our own solutions. We dug in and figured it out. Today we “leverage” code. We make a dependency file and list out…
I don’t buy object-relational mapping. It’s not because JPA or its implementations aren’t well written, but because the concept itself robs capability in exchange for conveniences we don’t really need. Relational databases have a lot to offer. SQL is a rich language that can perform complex queries, bulk data updates, computations, summaries, and more. It…
Objective-C has the best null handling of any object-oriented language. Here’s how it works: If you try to call a member function on a nil pointer, it is treated as a no-op. If the function returns a pointer, nil is substituted for the return value. If it returns a number, you get zero. Since there…
On Monday, April 24th, Meat Loaf took the stage at CW Post like a bat out of hell and proved to fans and skeptics alike that he remains one of the most powerful forces in rock music today. Waiting in Post’s Tilles Center for the show to begin, I admit to having had my reservations:…
When William Shatner’s career was on the skids. By now everyone’s heard about William Shatner’s The Transformed Man — that infamous 60’s recording where he sings Mr. Tambourine Man and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds — but check out this other Shatner LP, an ultra-rare two-record set recorded live in 1978. It’s a recording of an appearance at…
Ok — raise your hand if you didn’t own this record. What record collection would be complete without this Herb Alpert masterpiece? Certainly not mine! It has been said that the thrift stores of any large city contain enough copies of “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” to wallpaper a house (I once found 10 copies in one…
Early electronica with an amazing babe on the cover! I don’t usually buy albums solely for the cover art, but in this case I couldn’t resist. Produced in 1956, Wired For Sound is an early manifestation of the electronic music craze that would come to fruition some two decades later with the advent of the Moog synthesizer.…
