Technological Reminiscing

Waaaay back at the dawn of time, in 1991, I was responsible for a rewrite of a dBase database used by a bunch of hospitals to keep track of treatment in the neonatal intensive care units. By judicious use of caching data in memory, very careful construction of filter statements on the fly, etc. I was able to bring down some calculations from running overnight (and taking about 9 hours to run) to only taking 20 minutes. Which was something I was insanely proud of at the time.

Ten years later I rewrote it all again, this time in Visual Foxpro. And due to the database software being much better and the hardware being an order of magnitude faster, I was able to use simple SQL and have the queries run in real time (well, up to 10 seconds for a big one). It was such a relief to throw away the code I'd hand-crafted, and a joy to get the answers back quickly. And I don't even work with databases any more - but part of me misses having to carefully fine-tune SQL to eke out every last efficiency.

Originally a response to this post on theferrett's journal.

Language

If you have any interest in language then you'll love the two videos here. The first is a simple bit of thought about language - nothing terribly new, but nicely done. The second is Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie doing a sketch about language that strikes me as too high-brow for 99% of TV nowadays (mind you, the same probably goes for back then too).

And before I go in search of breakfast

daily_nemi

Grumpy? Moi?

[Poll #996280]

Uniqueness

Today's useful advice.

Unhappy?
Perfectionist?
Try The Golden Happiness Rule.