Graceful Exits

Today has been a day of minor disasters. More on those once they come to some sort of resolution. But I’ve also effected a minor hardware triumph with my old Kodak CX6230 camera. For two years (and two house-moves: God bless my hoarding instinct!) I’ve occasionally switched it on to be confronted with the message:
Camera [...]

One of the last tasks that moving to my new machine involves is to stretch the Ubuntu desktop across both of my monitors. Our sysadmin had very kindly set it up to work with the monitor card integral to the motherboard, so in principle I only had to tweak the configuration for X, the standard [...]

Elliotte Rusty Harold roundly disses microformats, comparing the practice of utilising them to homeopathy, of all “disciplines.” A bit of cheeky banter, so it’s probably churlish to point out that the comparison itself turns out to be unsound within his own argument: whereas homeopathy might arguably be no solution to any problem, Elliotte’s beef [...]

I’ve been asked a couple of times recently, as part of separate projects, to split the results of a SQL query on whitespace within. Simply put, how does one go from:
foo
foo bar
quux
blort wuu spong

to the expanded form:
foo
foo
bar
quux
blort
wuu
spong

efficiently and cleanly, only using SQL? (In case anyone’s worried, I’ve scrubbed the data sets of any personal details [...]

Apologies for the prolonged silence, so soon after starting this blog, but I’ve spent much of April and May planning a wedding, and slices of June on honeymoon. Traditional grooms get all the luck: gay-ass equal-opportunity feminist grooms have to help out with seating plans, favours, and invitations.