Stupid Coding Tricks: The T-SQL Mandelbrot – The Daily WTF
“So I was bored at work one day,” Graeme Job explains, “and wondered, what’s the most useless thing I could do with my time without actually doing anything. Then it hit me. I could use T-SQL to generate… Mandelbrot.”
Graeme continued, “Following is a single T-SQL SELECT statement that generates a text-representation of a Mandelbrot Set. The results are best viewed in text-mode.”
Something only Face could likely enjoy…
Today’s Times has a lengthy piece on what got Citigroup into trouble. In general, the plot line is not surprising — broad problems of corporate culture, lax internal oversight of potentially risky practices, a big, risky and ultimately disastrous move into mortgage-backed securities. There’s a lot of criticism of Chuck Prince who inherited the CEO job from Sandy Weill in 2003.
I just am starting to see that this is going to be a problem that is going to continue for a long time… It does seem that in many ways we are far from the bottom. I have to say that the focus on the financial markets is something that doesn’t really look like it will have a long term impact. We are a nation that is addicted to debt, the prevalence of consumer debt is insane. The traction that CC companies have in universities pushing credit products on college students, give-aways and spreading a sense of instant gratification is going to have a long time getting cleaned up. How much debt do you carry? Can you see yourself paying out of it anytime soon, what actual assets do you have backing your debt. Unsecured debt, get ready for that crash it’s coming and it is going to take down a lot of things people didn’t see
If you spend any time at all talking about online communities, you’re bound to stumble across the 90-9-1 Principle. The idea is simple: In social groups, some people actively participate more than others. Researcher Jakob Nielsen calls this “Participation Inequality“.
Pondering starting to think about a social website or adding interaction of this type to you site, this is a good principle to spend some time thinking about…
This book is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.
Looks like a good thing to spend some time pondering, on the plan for reading during the US Thanksgiving
own code
This site is devoted to collecting the kind of unusual English spellings that have come to be called eggcorns. Eggcorn, the word, is a coinage that goes back to the excellent Language Log. The About page retraces the history of the term and offers more information on how this site came to be.
The Eggcorn Database went public on February 15, 2005. It is a collaborative site in the sense that several contributors have access to it. In addition to me, the most active are the long-standing Language Log contributors Arnold Zwicky and Ben Zimmer. The Eggcorn Database has a forum now, with its own space for your contributions and submissions. Feel free to register and join in.
Something we should strive for? I think so.
> We, customers and companies alike, need to trust the people with whom we do business. Customers expect honest straightforward interactions where their voices are heard. Companies work to inspire brand loyalty and deliver satisfaction while trying to understand their customers better. It is evident that we all have crucial stake-and responsibility-in transforming the adversarial tone that too often dominates the customer experience.
I personally am going to try harder to maintain this perspective with my customers more.
Ok now that is actually going to be useful later
