WEBPAGE of DENNIS HAVLENA - W8MI Mackinac Straits, MI

WEBPAGE of DENNIS HAVLENA - W8MI Mackinac Straits, MI: "Articles here include how-to-build simple but nice sounding/playing folk instruments."

Getting started with online glasses

I first learned about this via GlassyEyes. He has some good introductory articles here and here. There are some discount links there as well. I learned a lot from the GlassyEyes forum. There is a flickr channel as well.

I've bought my glasses from EyeBuyDirect. It's convenient to be a repeat customer because they keep your prescription for you.

Lost Garden: Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1

Lost Garden: Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1: "Flash games are currently the ghetto of the game development industry. Compared to the number of players it serves, the Flash game ecosystem makes little money, launches few careers, and sustains few developer owned businesses. Despite the vast potential of the ecosystem, Flash games contribute surprisingly little to the advancement of game design as an art or a craft.
In order to understand why this promising game platform is such a surprising dissapointment, we'll look at Flash games from three perspectives:

* Chapter 2 - Making money: How do Flash developers currently make money.
* Chapter 3 - Generating value: How Flash developers currently create 'valuable' game for their players?
* Chapter 4 - Reaching customers: How developers currently reach their players.
* Chapter 5 - Premium Flash games as a service: A mental model for understanding the new world of web gaming.

For each step, I'll cover alternative techniques that give you, the game developer, make even better games."

Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp: "Just fifty years ago, John McCarthy circulated a notice that he would be giving an informal talk that he thought would be of interest. I drove up to MIT from New Jersey to attend this seminar of typical length in a typical classroom. But the seminar was anything but typical. It was a revelation. In one session at the blackboard, John introduced Lisp—all you could do with car, cdr, cons, cond, lambda, and recursion."

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzard and Hurricanes - Popular Mechanics

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzard and Hurricanes - Popular Mechanics: "Some disasters are simply not survivable. But most are, and research on human behavior suggests that the difference between life and death often comes down to the simple—yet surprisingly difficult—task of recognizing threats before they overwhelm you, then working through them as discrete challenges. The people who survive disasters tend to be better prepared and more capable of making smart decisions under pressure. Not everyone is born with these traits, but almost anyone can learn them. Here’s how to wire your brain for survival."

Dean Kamen Quotes About Health Care Debate - Interview With Inventor Dean Kamen - Popular Mechanics

Dean Kamen Quotes About Health Care Debate - Interview With Inventor Dean Kamen - Popular Mechanics: "n an interview with PM, Dean Kamen, one of the world's most prolific inventors of healthcare technologies, challenges the notion that the U.S. has a healthcare crisis. Rather than slowing the pace of medical progress in order to cut healthcare costs, he argues, America should be encouraging more innovation in life-saving drugs and technologies."

Lucian’s blog� Blog Archive � Me this trust thing = dog juicy bone

Lucian’s blog� Blog Archive � Me this trust thing = dog juicy bone: "On the upside, at least on this occasion I’m offering you some new thoughts on the subject, not just recycling that “As far as I’m concerned, trust in this country received its mortal wound, along with 60,000 soldiers in the British Army, on the first day of the First Battle of the Somme on 1st July 1916″ soapbox stuff that you’ve heard from me a million times already.

My theme today is that when we talk about consumers’ “trust” in financial services, we’re actually wrapping up about four or five different kinds of trust within that one single word - and on closer examination there are significant differences in the current status of each kind."

ORA-02437: cannot validate - primary key violated - Stack Overflow

ORA-02437: cannot validate <name> - primary key violated - Stack Overflow:

SQL>@%ORACLE_HOME%\rdbms\admin\utlexpt1.sql

Table created.

SQL> ALTER TABLE MY_TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT PK_FOO PRIMARY KEY (MY_ID)
2 exceptions into exceptions
3 /

Using DBMS_SYS_SQL to Execute Statements as Another User | Pythian Group Blog

Using DBMS_SYS_SQL to Execute Statements as Another User | Pythian Group Blog: "Sometimes you need to execute SQL (or PL/SQL) as some other user. Say you need to remove a job residing in some other user’s schema. Or you need to create a database link in a different schema. You can’t do things like these without becoming the other user. If you don’t know the other user’s password then you basically have two choices"

Online Name Generator

Online Name Generator: "Cool online names with a single click! - Free and cool name generator! - Cool nicknames and project names!"

Notes from the Metalevel

Notes from the Metalevel: "Notes from the Metalevel
An Introduction to Computer Composition"

"The Principia Discordia"

Toledo Nanochess and Toledo Picochess

Toledo Nanochess and Toledo Picochess: "Although Toledo Nanochess is smaller, it manages to beat gracefully Micromax v1.6,"

Micro-Max

Micro-Max: "As far as I am aware, this still makes micro-Max the smallest C Chess program in existence. A close competitor for this honor, Toledo, measures 2168 characters. Despite its smaller size, micro-Max seems to beat Toledo easily."

BashForth - Kwiki

BashForth - Kwiki: "BashForth is a ForthInterpreter, written entirely in the bash scripting language."

Tiny Code: Floppy booting, Open Firmware, Bitlash, more Movizt.

Tiny Code: Floppy booting, Open Firmware, Bitlash, more Movizt.: "There is a certain appeal in closing the meta-loop of minimalism in programming. Writing simple, efficient code in languages which themselves are simple and efficient. To that end, I've collected programming environments which are small and self contained, while still useful."

Speechification: Confessions of a Crap Artist

Speechification: Confessions of a Crap Artist: "Here’s some more from the (no doubt extraordinary) archives of Mr Ken Hollings – a show he made in 2006 about, well, er, Philip K Dick certainly. And tape-recorders and typewriters. And the divine. And madness, machines and mass suicide. Including contributions from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Nelson, Brian Aldiss, Tim Powers and James Blaylock. This is brilliant stuff."

Boing Boing

Boing Boing: "Seth Roberts made a list of 11 observations while shopping at a Wal-Mart in China. Here are the first four.

1. They sell live turtles.
2. A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
3. Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they’d be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
4. They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging."

Analytic functions by Example | Oracle FAQ

Analytic functions by Example | Oracle FAQ: "This article provides a clear, thorough concept of analytic functions and its various options by a series of simple yet concept building examples."

Oracle Tip: Create functions to join and split strings in SQL

Oracle Tip: Create functions to join and split strings in SQL: "A common task when selecting data from a database is to take a set of values a query returns and format it as a comma delimited list. Another task that's almost as common is the need to do the reverse: Take a comma delimited list of values in a single string and use it as a table of values."

Google File System II: Dawn of the Multiplying Master Nodes • The Register

Google File System II: Dawn of the Multiplying Master Nodes • The Register: "There are places in the design where we've tried to optimize for throughput by dumping thousands of operations into a queue and then just processing through them,' he continues. 'That leads to fine throughput, but it's not great for latency. You can easily get into situations where you might be stuck for seconds at a time in a queue just waiting to get to the head of the queue."

Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty

Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty: "If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic."

InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph

InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph: "In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe."

Play Infocom Games Online

Play Infocom Games Online: "Here you can find and play online every known version of every Infocom adventure."

HR 3200 from a systems design perspective (Part I) : Bruce F. Webster

HR 3200 from a systems design perspective (Part I) : Bruce F. Webster: "On the occasions where I have reviewed the actual text of major legislation, I have been struck by the parallels between legislation and software, particularly in terms of the pitfalls and issues with architecture, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Some of the tradeoffs are even the same, such as trading off the risk of “analysis paralysis” (never moving beyond the research and analysis phase) and the risks of unintended consequences from rushing ill-formed software into production. Yet another similarity is that both software and legislation tend to leverage off of, interact with, call upon, extend, and/or replace existing software and legislation. Finally, the more complex a given system or piece of legislation is, the less likely that it will achieve the original intent."

Northwest Montana Daily Inter Lake > Archives > Opinion > Columns > Charity and the good ol' Constitution

Northwest Montana Daily Inter Lake > Archives > Opinion > Columns > Charity and the good ol' Constitution: "'Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?'

That question was asked not of President Obama nor of Sen. Max Baucus or Rep. Nancy Pelosi, but of the less well-known Tennessee congressman, David Crockett."