September 2003

[25-Sep-2003]
Example code:   Ever since I first built eight-cubed.com, I have been meaning to do OpenVMS RTL programming examples and make them available here. A lot of things have delayed me, including coming up with an easy way to manage what will eventually total approximately 400 C programs (hopefully!). Another challenge was to come up with a way to allow visitors to view the files as HTML without me having to code a separate HTML page for each example. Now, both those obstacles have been overcome, and I am pleased to present the first 20 snippits available from the new Code examples page. (101 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[20-Sep-2003]
Styling the RSS feeds:   A few people have been adding XSL style sheets to their RSS feeds, which is a particularly good idea. Instead of clicking on a link and having a bunch of XML appear, you can tell people that they are viewing XML and format it nicely for them, as long as they have an XSL compliant browser. I have just added this functionality to eight-cubed. (76 words, 0 comments, 1 pings)

[18-Sep-2003]
PITA:   Dave Thomas: I think every team of a certain size needs a professional pain in the ass, because teams get complacent, fixed in their ways. They need nudging out of their comfort zone once in a while, so they can look at problems from a different perspective. There are two kinds of pains in the ass: the obnoxious boor - to be avoided on all teams - and the person who never learned that grownups shouldn't ask "Why?" all the time. The latter is a treasure. (87 words, 1 comments, 0 pings)

[14-Sep-2003]
Repartitioning the GS160s:   This morning, I shut down the two AlphaServer GS160s that make up the data warehouse cluster so I could repartition them. (175 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[11-Sep-2003]
EMC kills WideSky:   Proving that standards aren't just to be followed in the web space, EMC just killed their proprietary hetrogeneous storage management API, WideSky. As reported by this article at the Register, EMC thinks it's time for an alternate approach. Death to marketing hype. (44 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[08-Sep-2003]
Weekend Sabbatical:   I'm just back from a weekend in San Francisco. I took Friday and Monday off so I could have a complete weekend in the city while the pager, phone, and computers remained in Sacramento. (183 words, 1 comments, 0 pings)

[01-Sep-2003]
Health research:   An article at the Philadelphia Inquirer, "First comes the suburban sprawl, then the spread" highlights one of the differences between how I perceive Australia and California. I will let the article speak for itself. (34 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)