Viewing profile — phicou

I have a school-age family member who is interested in programming, but does not have internet access. As a beyond-last-minute Christmas gift, I'd like to make a CD, DVD, or thumb …

We (developers and sysadmins) use it at the big corporation where I work. Keeping irssi open in screen (GNU screen) means I can connect remotely from anywhere with a single session…

Ignore the name - this is a clearly-written introduction to stream processing algorithms.

The most important question you should ask yourself at the end of each interview is "Do I want this person on my team?" If you're not sure, the answer is no. Aside from that, be wa…

FYI for those interested in working with this data in a Geo-enabled RDBMS: It's pretty easy to get most of this data into a database on your own using GeoDjango. A simple non-TIGER…

A friend of mine just mentioned this to me tonight. The costs can be really insidious in unexpected ways. My state is now offering insurance benefits to domestic partners, but the …

I've used log files extensively for security. Aside from the obvious post-incident investigation, I've set up (nearly-) real-time scanning of logs feeding into programs that scan f…

For US citizens, Peace Corps is one way to meet both of those goals. For people from other countries, there are similar organizations in many countries, and some that accept volunt…

Your "better" example is almost exactly true of my car. According to the dealer, the "Miles before service needed" that shows up when I start it is based on the number of cold star…

There's also a large body of PHP coders who are smart and continue learning new things, but you don't hear as much about them because they don't publicly humiliate themselves on th…

This should be a big help in writing clean server-side sorts by an arbitrary column in tabular data. Previously we've had to do some rather ugly things with "create_function" and l…

College is a great opportunity to try a lot of different things. There's a lot of good advice here, but I'd like to suggest that you find some time to do some kind of volunteer wor…

I learned an unfamiliar language while spending two years in the Peace Corps. They have had many years to refine their language teaching materials. Still, I only learned the basics…

Two friends and I are planning to start a web business and were wondering what type of business structure is best forour situation. We intend to do this in our spare time, and we a…

My coworker and I were just (10 minutes ago) talking about the need for a site like this, so I'm giving the idea a big thumbs-up! We might try it out and offer additional suggestio…

And math, real math, is not about the mindless execution of predefined algorithms such as linear algebra. It is about understanding those algorithms, using higher-order logic to un…