(I was listening to Grammar Girl, and the topic was "graduated from college". Lo and behold...)

This is an English major who can't write two sentences without twice as many errors: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/127475

"I recently graduated college with a degree in English and am at a major crossroad in my life. I can either go to Japan and teach English for a year or go back to school for my teaching credential/master's degree. What should I do?"

Did he really get a degree in English? I got mine in Ethnic Studies, which is allegedly not a good degree. Here's the corrected version:

The Nerd Handbook, at Rands in Repose.

One way to stay in control is to get the computer to tell you to stop working. Work Rave break enforcer.

I've been seeing RoHS all over. Finally found out it is the European anti-poison law. It's what prevents lead from getting into China-sourced goods in Europe. Our lack of a similar law leaves Americans eating lead and roofies. Nothing like a little NAFTA-esque reduction of anti-business regulations to poison the populace. Thank you, spirit of Ronald Reagan.

I've been learning a bit of MS Access lately, and unable to keep up with writing stuff. Sysadminning takes priority. Here are some interesting things:

I was watching some video of 60-Minutes, and they referred to the Brookings Institute as "left-leaning". What? I thought I was up to date on the Left stuff, but didn't know the BI was "left". A web search for "Left Leaning Brookings Institute" turned up a lot of results.

Apple's release of Safari for Windows was a minor shocker, because, rather than porting the browser to Windows, it looks like they ported a significant fraction of the OS X environment to Windows. The graphics subsytem appears to have been ported. Networking, which is just generic BSD networking, was probably ported too. I wouldn't be surprised if they emulated all of BSD as a Windows library -- that's exactly what Cygwin does for Linux.

What this means for developers is obvious: Apple may be in a position to sell a crossplatform option for XCode. That puts them in the non-market of the growing number of crossplatform Unix-Windows tools like wxWidgets, FLTK, MinGW, and Cygwin. (Not to mention the Firefox web browser.)

I've wasted around five hours this past week dealing with miscellaneous Windows XP licensing issues. Ever since Microsoft (basically) started tracking users, it's been difficult to resort to the tried-and-true technique of "justified piracy" to maintain one's legitimate software license rights. After all, the way 99% of the world sees it, if you paid for a licensed copy, but lost the CD, you're entitled to use the software legally.

For a while, I've bought into an idea that some folks (like Dave Winer) have promulgated about information. They say that there are three ways to organize information: chronologically, tabular, and hierarchically. (Notably, project management software combines all three.)

It seems about right, though the description seems too facile. Right now, computers can have tables and hierarchies, but there's not much support for storing and querying collected time-interval data. Most time data are treated as "atoms," when, in reality, most time data is some kind of interval.

One other kind of information seems to be missing: indeterminacy. Quantum mechanics (a subject about which I know little) and fuzzy logic (again, don't know much) both deal with the fact that you don't really know the value of a measurement, until you also know how accurate your measurement is. In other words, you need to know how much confidence you have in your data; statistics and statistical methods (a class I didn't do well in) are important.

This is a repository of "novice" articles, written with the intent of driving more traffic to the site, and getting more ad clicks. It's pretty crass, I know, but the information may be very useful. Some of the content is adapted from the diy notes, and other notebooks, which are a bit rougher than these.

Most of these articles are not authoritative, because they're based on what I'm learning, as I'm learning it.

There is no charge or royalty on any code posted to this site, unless indicated within the code. Assume everything in in the public domain unless there's a copyright in it.

If you find this code useful, and it saves you an hour of work here or there, you might want to consider making a donation to the site.

The average cost of a line of code ranges between $.30 to $2, according to what I've read. It might be more. The solutions here, ostensibly, cost anywhere from $50 to $200 to produce, if you believe programmers.

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This is an obsolete article, and left here as a placeholder until a better one can be written.

This is a snapshot of GGDatabase.class.php, a bit of code to construct objects that hold metadata about a MySQL table.

<?php
/**
 * Copyright 2006 Slaptech.net
 */
$base = '../';
include_once('../config/config.inc.php');

/*
 * Database and table metadata section
 */

class GGDatabaseMetaData {
	var $tables = array();
}
class GGTableMetaData {
	var $fields = array();
	function GGTableMetaData( $table )
	{
		$db = new Database();
		$sql = "SELECT * FROM $table";
		$db->query( $sql );
		$numFields = mysql_num_fields($db->result);
		$table  = mysql_field_table($db->result, 0);
		for ( $i=0; $i < $numFields; $i++ ) 
		{
			$name  = mysql_field_name($db->result, $i);