It’s the holidays and people are drifting in and out of the house. Apparently there is lots of sleeping over going on, although no one bothered to ask me. If you lived here when you were a kid and still have a key to the front door, you don’t need to ask. I can see…
People who are following the reverb10 blogs would no doubt be disappointed by today’s post because it has absolutely nothing to do with finding my compass in life, unless life’s compass is possibly nested in a SAS macro. Since I started this blog to write down things I was sure I would want to remember…
I was reading this article in the Wall Street Journal on SAS software and CEO Jim Goodnight said, “We’re producing so many new products. [They’re all] in the funnel and we’ve got to get them in production and it’s taking us longer to get them out the door…. A lot of the problems are testing…
Unstructured data is to the usual database as Toontown is to Irvine Ranch (or Diamond Bar or Porter Ranch or any other white bread community that has two names, six types of floor plans and where half the children are named Buffy, Jessica, Jason or Justin – you know who you are). If one were…
I am a huge fan of the OpenGov initiative. In brief, this is an effort mandated by executive order to increase transparency in government. One of the major benefits to people like me with equal parts curiosity, cynicism and gigabytes of RAM is that anyone can access just mountains of government data by going to…
The difference between working for a business and being at a university is in a business we’re not paying you to show us how smart you are. Don’t get me wrong. I think the best career advice I ever read was in an article by James Watson in Technology Review, never be the brightest person…
You know those movies you see where there’s a guy that looks like Brad Pitt (or is Brad Pitt) and some woman who looks like Miss Universe and they sit down at a random computer and in less than five minutes they have re-programmed all of the computers on Planet Earth while simultaneously disarming the…
AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION THIS WEEK … “This paper is not going to be as much an academic treatise as most of the ones I write, but I am hoping it will be more interesting. I was wondering about the fact that some well-respected people say the secret to career success is to be the foremost…
So, I am writing these papers on moving from novice to intermediate programmer and Kim Le Bouton has to go apply logic to it and ask, “Just how do you define a novice programmer, anyway?” I was tempted to be a smart ass about it and answer that it was anyone who didn’t come to…
Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a future where all plays were performed by robots that had been programmed with the combined characteristics of the world’s best actors. An aspiring actor sadly asked the technician working on the computers to run these robots: “What would you do if they invented a little…