Author: Ezra S F


  • Humans are fallible. Humans write the code. Therefore, there will be bugs in the code. But that is okay. Humans are smart. Humans can try new ways of working with the software until they find the way the programmer intended it to work. … Or they hire people like me to help them. So it…

  • We maintain a wiki page with which DBA will do which maintenance. By convention, the months are the first three characters of the month’s name. In doing updates, I noticed only month marked as misspelled was Sep for September. So Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Oct, Nov, Dec were all okay spellings but Sep was not? Changing it to Sept made it…

  • There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

  • I saw a version of this commercial without the sneaking through the gate and most chase stuff. My first impression was, does humanity get so ignorant of the past that they are unaware of what populated the Earth 85 million years ago? After watching this version, it answered my question: yes. Anyone who read or…

  • Guard Dead Paper?

    Seth said, “What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper.” Whenever, I read “mere”, “only”, or “just” as a descriptor, it makes me sad someone (even me) relies on obvious straw men. Librarians already do more than guard dead paper. It just makes it easier to knock them down and kick them while…

  • Towel Day is an annual celebration on the 25th of May, as a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001). On that day, fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his honour. From towelday.org. According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar…

  • We acquired Blackboard Mobile Learn Powerlink version 1.1.9 to solve a problem. Something was done on the Blackboard side before our institution administrators could successfully get to the registration page. This version fixed that issue by doing a registration behind the scenes. Naturally the information it has is wrong, but at least now the institution administrators can…

  • What would be in your sandwich? Richard Feynman wrote a couple of my favorite books: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist. It was reassuring to find someone who held similar views on the world. Susskind’s The Black Hole War is on my to-read list. Guess…

  • Mark Wescott wrote to a Blackboard Learn 9 list, Imagine a world where Bb Inc. provides browser checkers for each Rev/SP combo, and all we (aka “The Customers”) have to do is place a link on our Bb logon page to the browser checker that matches our production environment…. mmmm serenity. Said browser checkers would:…