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wulczeron What percentage of people are alive today?

Yeah, and Noah reportedly died at 950, so I'd definitely take these numbers with a drop of hemlock :)

wulczeron What percentage of people are alive today?

And he died condemned to death and executed, too! So he could have lived happily for many more years.

wulczeron JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML

That's fine for them. My question stands: what's wrong with someone proposing a generic way of transforming JSON to XML?

wulczeron JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML

That's not hard, what's hard is

   //person[@alive="true"]/pets//dog[@hair="long"]/*/flea[@name]

wulczeron JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML

all common XML message formats including POX (Plain Old XML), SOAP, REST and AJAX

That made my day.

wulczeron JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML

Not sure what all the fuss is about. It's actually neat to have a common way of changing JSON to XML, think of a web service that offers an API using our beloved JSON. But wait, we also want to provide an XML API! Let's design our own, ad-hoc, crappy mapping or... use that thing that everyone else is using.

XML is out there, has lots of tools and libraries and is actually useful for some things. Not to mention the array of technologies around it, like XPath, XQuery etc, that JSON is lacking (probably because it doesn't need it, because these formats do address slightly different requirements. Gasp!).

wulczeron Top Missing PostgreSQL Features

Not in the sense that query hints are "hints" to the planner.

-O2 means "take more time compiling but produce faster code". This hint will always be valid and useful, regardless of how the codebase changes. Query planner hints can become obsolete as the data distribution changes.

-fwrapv and -fno-strict-aliasing are correctness settings

-Wxxx are just help for the developers

wulczeron Top Missing PostgreSQL Features

If you find yourself needing an index only scan, you can try to use workarounds like http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Loose_indexscan

wulczeron Top Missing PostgreSQL Features

To answer your question about getting the first 10 rows, you can use the LIMIT clause, which will influence the planner's decisions. Or you can declare a cursor for your query and only fetch the first 10 rows.

As for GCC, it's usually up to the packagers, but the source tree after running ./configure gets compiled with:

  -O2 -Wall -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wendif-labels -Wformat-security -fno-strict-aliasing -fwrapv

wulczeron Top Missing PostgreSQL Features

Nice writeup. Point #7 (no logging) should be addressed by CREATE UNLOGGED TABLE (http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/sql-createta...) which is coming in 9.1

wulczeron Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free"

Well since I've written that other comment before seeing this, the link is there, but what the hell, I can repeat it: http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions

wulczeron Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free"

Heh, it might be true, but I'm sure that lawyers that work in software companies screening the project BigCorp wants to use for potential licensing problems will share a laugh amongst them, but will then write to the boss saying: "It's risky, don't use that code".

wulczeron Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free"

Oops, I was in the process of writing a comment about that (with a link) and only saw yours after I sent mine...

wulczeron Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free"

By the way, just to prove I'm not such a stiff, I rememberd and quickly found this: http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions

It genuinely made me laugh :)

wulczeron Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free"

Yeah, well, hate to be a partybreaker and I personally love that "Goot, not Evil" clause, but in the world of lawyers jokes do not exist. It's cute, but for serious software keep the licensing simple.

wulczeron How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings

Yeah, and also reencoding from a lossy format always leads to quality loss, that's why the format is called lossy.

wulczeron One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves

Very interesting comment. For me the line is profiting from the copied content/software. I am opposed to people selling pirated movies on the streets and not so to people downloading and watching them in their homes.

wulczeron Chinese Infinite Magical Hard-Drive

Depends on the codecs and the container format. With an Ogg/Vorbis/Theora you should be able to cut it in pieces an it will work. With, say, H.264/AAC in FLV you can't.

wulczeron NoSQL Is Technologically Inferior To SQL

I wouldn't say it's technologically inferiot. I'd say it's less mature.

Making desing choices is OK. The authors admits that relational databases have different design goals and thus comaring them directly is necessarily comparing apples to oranges.

What is true and wise is that non-relational databases have been around for much less time, have less theoretical background, the development teams and DBAs are less experienced with them, etc.

wulczeron Starcraft Network

Yeah, now that I think of it I can't remember why I'm doing the 01 thing. Must be residual from my previous job where we used this pattern.

I remember reading through the Bind file and seeing

  # >10k machines? NEVER!
  streamer0001.xxx...

wulczeron Starcraft Network

Sounds fun if you do it for your home network, but profesionally you'll quickly appreciate embracing a more dull pattern of calling database machines db01, db02, etc, preproduction machines preprod01, preprod02, etc. And the sysadmin that will come after you will appreciate it even more.

wulczeron MySQL.com compromised via (guess what?) SQL injection

At least in PostgreSQL you can use binary parameters: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/libpq-exec.html

Of course that does not help if you construct the entire query string as text before sending it to the server, which is how SQL injection most commonly happens.

wulczeron MySQL.com compromised via (guess what?) SQL injection

Absolutely. The web application should be logging to the database as an unpriviledged user. Seems that by now most people have learned that running web services as root is a bad idea, but they still forget that they should also have an unpriviledged database user for them.

wulczeron At least now we know why Color really got that funding

Or even:

  ~$ for x in colo{,u}r.com; do echo $x; dig +short $x; done

wulczeron Lisp: a cult I almost joined (2005)

Elite hackers from jokes?

wulczeron Lisp: a cult I almost joined (2005)

Come on, there are lots of self-deprecating Lisp jokes, my favourite being:

An elite hacker broke into a government system and found the code of a secret NASA project. He tried to download it, but the sysadmins noticed the intrusion and eventually cut the hacker off. He only managed to get the last 40 kB of the source file and unfortunately, because the project was written in Lisp, it contained nothing but closing parens.

wulczeron A fifteen year old TCP bug?

You can't always reply on the compiler inlining your function, and AFAIK there's no portable way of forcing inlining.

wulczeron Interview with Hillary Mason, Chief Scientist of Bit.ly

Just think about the availability constraints such service needs to comply with. I can't remember a bit.ly outage, and an outage would make half the Internet unhappy.

Same for spam filtering, automatic reporting using the "+" links etc. At some scale level keeping up any service becomes a nontrivial task.

wulczeron Simple JavaScript Inheritance with Backbone

Shouldn't the first example read:

  george.roar(); // displays: "George, the lion ROARS!!!"