“Congress Created Dust Bowl” is a sign by the side of the road along Interstate 5 in the California Central valley. According to KQED, the sign was created in 2008 by former farmer Russ Waymire from the group Families Protecting the Valley. The sign is discussed in “The New Dust Bowl” from Mother Jones in […]
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Pastafarian Holy Days
I built a little Pastafarian Calendar website and iCalendar feed. Now you too can know what holy day the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is observing each day! Thanks to Noam for the inspiration.
Technical Interview: movie SQL schema design
When interviewing candidates, sometimes we need to know if they grok SQL. Here’s a simple interview question that gives me an idea that someone has had to create a schema from scratch, vs. always using a schema that someone else created. Setup We’re going to design a movies database. Each movie has a title and […]
“Unique” Random Numbers technical interview question
Dan Karp used to ask this question at Zimbra. I’ve always loved it. 1. warmup Given this API from the java.lang standard Math class in the JDK: Your task is to implement a random integer in the range [0,999]. Don’t overthink it; this is just a warmup. Solution: Idea is to truncate a number like 123.99748 […]
All-day untimed events in RFC 2445 iCalendar
Timely‘s WordPress Calendar plugin doesn’t interoperate well with RFC 2445 iCalendar feeds that contain all-day untimed events specified by both DTSTART and a DURATION:P1D. Instead of interpreting them as a one-day all-day event, it seems to interpret them as a two-day event. I examined a half-dozen calendar apps to see how they generate these kinds […]
Early days of Favicon.ico
My friend and colleague Ray Sun writes about Inventing Favicon.ico on his blog. Nice trip down memory lane, when we could get stuff done in a matter of hours and touch the lives of hundreds of millions of users.
Farewell, htdig
htdig has been retired from radwin.org. Many years ago I set up a site search on radwin.org using a tool called ht://Dig. It was a C/C++ app that would spider/crawl a website and also serve out search results in an HTML-friendly fashion through a CGI. The rest of the world moved onto Lucene/Solr, but I never […]
Paternity leave coding update
Three and a half weeks into my sabbatical, and I’ve actually found some time to code on Hebcal! Some Hebcal accomplishments in July: Moved Hebcal for Unix code from SourceForge to GitHub. Added two new user-requested features and released hebcal-3.13 Added Printable PDF support for Hebcal.com Forked a copy of Hebcal for Unix especially for […]
On paternity leave, hope to write some code
I’m taking 3 months off to hang out with the family! Baby Emma is doing great, and the big kids are, well, big. It’s been about 7 years since I’ve had a sabbatical from work, so this seems like a great time to do it. One of my first projects was to move hebcal for Unix from SourceForge to […]