Author: mcherm
Once upon a time, all good software used some sort of a command
language. Whether it was a word processor like
Emacs, a typesetting program
like TeX, or even something like a graphing
program, everything had a command line at the bottom and some kind of
command language that could …
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Posted Mon 29 December 2008
by mcherm
in Programming
Suppose you are setting up your database table, and you want to create a
column to store an email address. How many characters should you allow
in the field?
In Oracle (what I use most often), the correct type to use for an email
is VARCHAR2(x) for some value …
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Posted Wed 17 December 2008
by mcherm
in Programming
As Willie Sutton didn't
say, "I rob banks
because that's where the money is."
I work for a bank, and so I worry more about security than most
programmers. After all, if a hacker were were truly motivated and
competent who would they pick to go after? Probably a bank …
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Posted Thu 04 December 2008
by mcherm
in Programming
Here is a description of all items that will be on my local ballot for
this upcoming election, along with my own personal recommendations on
how I expect to vote, and why. For quite some time now, I've done this
sort of research before elections; this time I decided to …
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Posted Sat 01 November 2008
by mcherm
in Politics
Once upon a time (in the dark ages of web application development) we
built our applications as a single monolithic Perl CGI script, or
perhaps a large JSP file containing the entire application. The code
looked something like this:
costs.jsp
<% Cost[] costs = CostHelper.calculateCosts(loanData, currentDecision); %>
Current Costs:
Cost …
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Posted Mon 27 October 2008
by mcherm
in Uncategorized