June 28, 2011
When you have a DB2 database which multiple people can update, sooner or later you are likely to end up with a deadlock. You’ll issue a simple query to update some data, and wait… and wait… and wait. I hit this problem this morning. It took a while to work out how to diagnose the [...]
Filed under: System administration | Comments (0)
June 7, 2011
Recent versions of DB2 have support for Unicode, if your databases are flagged as Unicode-enabled. This is a good thing, so you may have done it without thinking too much about the consequences. After all, i18n is good, right? Unfortunately there are some major snags to be aware of. In particular, in Unicode-enabled databases the [...]
Filed under: Java | Comments (0)
April 28, 2011
Scenario: You are using WordPress with OpenID, using the openid plugin. Symptom: You get an error page looking something like Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could not be converted to string in /home/meta/public_html/lpar/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 2822 when users try to log in. Diagnosis: You can patch the appropriate code in formatting.php so that [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments (0)
April 27, 2011
I just became aware of an interesting JavaScript ‘feature’. The code y = x % 1; is equivalent to y = x – Math.floor(x); because ECMA-262 says: … the floating-point remainder r from a dividend n and a divisor d is defined by the mathematical relation r = n − (d * q) where q [...]
Filed under: JavaScript | Comments (1)
April 5, 2011
Recently someone on Stack Exchange asked Why are there no alternatives to TeX, or, why is TeX still used? Here are some reasons. It works. It sounds trite, but TeX has a robustness and reliability that other software lacks. Recently, there was a discussion of a bug in LuaTeX triggered when a document hits 3,987 [...]
Filed under: Business, Standards | Comments (0)
April 1, 2011
Yesterday I ran into a familiar SSL problem. I learned that a Sun engineer named Andreas Sterbenz had written a handy utility to solve the problem, and posted it on his Sun blog. I looked to see what else he had posted. The last entry mentioned that he had jumped ship to Google, and pointed [...]
Filed under: Business, Culture | Comments (0)
March 29, 2011
When you have IBM Lotus Domino in your organization, sooner or later you come up with a requirement to move data between Domino and some other system–often a relational database. There are many ways to do this, and not much guidance is offered as to which to pursue, so here’s a summary of my own [...]
Filed under: Domino, Java, Linux, LotusScript, Programming | Comments (0)
March 23, 2011
Back in 1978, when the TeX project began, there were no scalable fonts. If your printer supported 10 point and 12 point text, those were the two sizes you could use in your documents. Even when the Macintosh came along, you still had a fixed set of text sizes, unless you were rich enough to [...]
Filed under: TeX | Comments (0)
March 15, 2011
When I posted that I was going back to using TeX, I mentioned that TeX had changed a lot in 20 years, but didn’t really go into too many details. Time to remedy that. TeX is two layers of software. Underneath is the core of TeX, written in a variant of Pascal. These days it [...]
Filed under: TeX | Comments (0)
March 10, 2011
Last week I had a bad experience with several pieces of office software. It started with a simple enough task: I had some existing documentation, and I needed to extend the “How to perform common tasks” section. There were two sub-headings to add, each of which needed a few bulleted paragraphs of instructions. I fired [...]
Filed under: TeX | Comments (0)