My new notebook arrived three days ago: a MacBook Pro. As this is my first Apple machine ever, I am experincing some beginner’s transitional surprises.
The first surprise was somewhat disappointing. I was unable to access my wirless network due to an umlaut in the network’s ID string. Because I had a lot of software to [...]

After quite some time I write one of these things that were supposed to be the overall topic of this blog: a snippet. This time, it’s a bookmarklet. My first bookmarklet at all. So without further ado, here’s what it takes to immediately jump from an O’Reilly catalog page to the corresponding search page at [...]

A few weeks ago I joined Goodreads. A few days ago I installed a wordpress plugin that displays three of the books on my ‘currentl reading’ shelf. This plugin uses the RSS features delivered with wordpress. It fetches the feed belonging to the shelf, grabs the first three items and displays them in my sidebar.
I [...]

Here’s a both entertaining and interesting introductory lesson about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This guy seems to really know what he’s talking about. I already put the book on my wishlist. I guess he could make his point clear with a little less jumping around on stage, but if that’s his preferred way of [...]

The Wisdom of Crowds:
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have [...]

Programming Collective Intelligence:
This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build web applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze [...]

In a post about the Google Social Graph API, Tim O’Reilly pointed out to two profiles that Google doesn’t know about: dopplr and goodreads. As I am not a business traveller, dopplr doesn’t seem to be of any use to me right now. But goodreads looked interesting.

So from now on, in addition to my posts [...]

The traditional & syntax has its uses—it’s the only way to call a subroutine whose name is a keyword, for example, &for
Using keywords as subroutine identifiers? What could this possibly be useful for, except confusing co-workers? Due to the fact that the book is about "Writing better programs", they should have indicated this as being [...]

In the description of Programming Perl at oreilly.com it says
Any Perl book can have a title, but only this book is affectionately known by all Perl programmers as “The Camel.”

This undoubted leadership among the vast amount of printed books about Perl is in my opinion one of the most fascinating aspects of the entire [...]

Columns can be qualified by column_name and table_name.column_name, but also by database_name.table_name.column_name
DESC or DESCRIBE is a shortcut for SHOW COLUMNS FROM, but the long version can also take a where clause to show, for example, only integer columns: SHOW COLUMNS FROM table WHERE Type LIKE ‘int%’
Relational operators (such as < and >) can also be [...]