From Tim Bray tonight comes this amazing fact: There are five billion new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there are (wait for it) 220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them).
Category: Computers
Blog bot roundup
The variety is amazing: here’s a list of various agents, spiders and bots that I’ve culled from my chuggnutt.com logfiles over the last 30 days that have to do with RSS and/or blogs (specifically blogs, not just general purpose spiders like Google’s). These are only the ones I know for sure are blog or RSS… Continue reading Blog bot roundup
Friendster goes PHP
An item I saw yesterday but forgot to blog about: Friendster goes PHP. Pretty cool. Finally on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn’t look much different, but hopefully we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably poky… Continue reading Friendster goes PHP
Spolsky on the Windows API
Joel Spolsky on How Microsoft Lost the API War: Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and are now developing for the web…. Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since moved to the… Continue reading Spolsky on the Windows API
vCard
I’ve been playing with the vCard format for a project at work and I gotta say, there’s a technology that’s begging to be re-implemented in XML. I mean, here’s the behind-the-scenes formatting of a vCard file: BEGIN:VCARD FN:Mr. John Q. Public, Esq. N:Public;John;Quinlan;Mr.;Esq. BDAY:1995-04-15 ADR;DOM;HOME:P.O. Box 101;Suite 101;123 Main Street;Any Town;CA;91921-1234; TEL;PREF;WORK;MSG;FAX:+1-800-555-1234 END:VCARD …with a… Continue reading vCard
Useless lists: Computer stuff
A co-worker who’s moving was telling me today about finding a dusty box in his attic that turned out to be an original Atari 2600, and for some reason that made me want to blog about it. Instead, this turned into a list of all the various computer and video game systems I own that… Continue reading Useless lists: Computer stuff
overLIB
Pointer to a totally excellent JavaScript library for creating popups: overLIB. I’ve been using it the last few days to put together a dynamic drop-down menu for a Web project at work. And I’ve used it before to create popup context menus and tooltips. It’s simply one of the best JavaScript tools out there that… Continue reading overLIB
Imperfect end to an imperfect week
I couldn’t even get myself to post yesterday, I was just done. This last week was the shit week for computer troubles. After spending the first half of the week struggling over my wife’s computer, and Thursday reformatting and reinstalling Windows on a coworker’s computer, Friday was the kicker. The hard drive in the boss’s… Continue reading Imperfect end to an imperfect week
Some nights I just hate computers…
God damn the computers are pissing me off tonight. All evening our broadband cable connection has just been running slower than molasses, so it takes forever to accomplish anything online. And then I’m trying to get my wife’s computer fixed up, it’s been running really slow lately and locking up a lot. So I rolled… Continue reading Some nights I just hate computers…
Search Patch
While waiting to find out if my hosting provider will change the minimum fulltext word length for MySQL, here’s what I’ve done in the meantime to deal with viable three-character search terms. First, I split the search string into the component words (an array). I subtract any stopwords (I’ve got a big list) and for… Continue reading Search Patch