The following is my attempt to document a remarkably painful process that got even more remarkably painful under El Capitan than it was under earlier versions of Mac OS. It concerns querying an Oracle database from within a Python script via the cx_Oracle library. If you don’t query Oracle databases from Python scripts via the&ellipsis;Read the full post »
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I’m trying to find an answer to this, but the web has been remarkably unforthcoming. This includes the usually stellar Stack Overflow. Here’s what’s going on: * I’ve gotten comfortable in jQuery over the past few months. It is awesome. * I’ve just started playing with XMLHttpRequest objects (i.e.,“Ajax”). * jQuery has a few methods&ellipsis;Read the full post »
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era This is the best single-volume history of the Civil War — and the run-up to it — that I’ve read. It’s gracefully written, meticulous without being overburdened with minutiae, and scholarly. I’ve written before about the deep difficulty I have building a historical imagination&ellipsis;Read the full post »
Today I learned about the SQL WITH-statement. I’d been using CREATE VIEW whenever I needed to join a complex query to itself; have I been doing it all wrong all these years? If nothing else, WITH is a lot more concise than what I had been doing, which was CREATE OR REPLACE TEMPORARY VIEW. Are&ellipsis;Read the full post »
A friend asked a probability question today (viz., if you roll six dice, what’s the probability that at least one of them comes up a 1 or a 5?), so I answered it analytically and then wrote a quick Python simulation to test my analytical answer. That’s all fine, but what annoys me is how&ellipsis;Read the full post »
(Attention conservation notice: 3600-some words on the four books I read over Christmas and New Years. A lot of it is my processing and synthesizing my understanding of the runup to World War I. Valuable for me, anyway.) Not a bad run: four books from December 21 to December 31. My total for 2013 was&ellipsis;Read the full post »
The Census Bureau, 72 years after the 1940 census, put the raw data from the 1940 census up on the web last year. It is completely fascinating. It’s also tricky, for me anyway, to find my ancestors’ information. My partner has an easier task for her grandparents: they lived in New York City, and the&ellipsis;Read the full post »
Farhad Manjoo’s piece about Facebook Graph Search is the best possible case for why we should care about Facebook Graph Search, which leads ineluctably to the conclusion that we shouldn’t care about Facebook Graph Search. Here’s the sort of thing that Facebook Graph Search lets you do, according to Manjoo: > The most interesting searches&ellipsis;Read the full post »
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tools that help make the difficult easy, which has got me thinking again about probably my favorite quote of all time, by A.N. Whitehead: It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the&ellipsis;Read the full post »
It’s one of the largely unpublicized but seemingly very important parts of the Affordable Care Act that restaurants with more than 20 establishments will have to start attaching calorie counts to their menu items. (This is in section 4205 of the bill. Because THOMAS links are still, bizarrely, after 15 years, inscrutable and impermanent, I’ve&ellipsis;Read the full post »
Steve Reads 