Posts under ‘ancient’

SWI-Prolog is available as prepackaged binaries for Mac OS X 10.3+, but not for 10.2.  If you try and install the 10.3 binary package, you will get errors (at least, I did).  The answer is to compile from source.  You are probably compile-savvy if you are looking to install a Prolog interpreter, but if not, [...]

Paymaxx, a payroll services provider, recently confessed to a major mistake that essentially made public many of their customers' employees' W-2 forms. My firm uses Paymaxx to run payroll. So, as it happens, does another Harvard-associated person's small computer firm. This person, however, has more time (or more curiosity) than I, and discovered a gaping [...]

Executive Summary: – I examine one Oregon Lottery video poker machine's reports over a circa three-year period. – The “loss rate” for a brisk player at most games is $27 per hour, nearly four times the minimum wage. – The “house edge” on most games is over five times worse than that with e.g. craps [...]

This posting has three parts: I. Why video lottery is a bad thing for the state to run     in which I describe philosophical and practical problems with the status quo. II. What the state doesn't tell about the mechanics of video lottery     in which I describe the key statistical metrics of how deleterious [...]

CVSPermissions is a set of scripts that are called by CVS upon invoking certain operations, such as commit (wisely, CVS has hooks for just this purpose).  The scripts check an access control list, and selectively permit operations based on username.  Unfortunately, while the scripts come pretty elegantly close to “the simplest thing that could possibly [...]

In Class::DBI, there appears to be a problem with the Postgresql driver and certain kinds of relationships being defined.  It shows up as a “can't bind a reference” error in the DBIx::Recordset code for Postgres. It persists for me with Class::DBI 0.96 and DBIx::Recordset 0.26. The effect is seen for me when I retrieve a [...]

Scenario: you are using DBD::Pg to interface with your database (perhaps directly through DBI, or through an abstraction layer like Class::DBI or DBIx::ContextualFetch) when you get an odd result: DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near [your string, or the part of your string that doesn't begin with leading digits] at … [...]

“I have created a computer virus and released it over the Internet.  It is named “EULAVirus” version 1.0. “The virus takes the following actions, besides replicating itself.  It seeds a pseudorandom number generator with a number based upon the machine's unique characteristics, such that the PRNG sequence will always be the same for the same [...]

I use Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) on Windows 2000 when I have to (much better to use Mozilla or Opera in my opinion; even some of the Microsoft guys are now eschewing IE for security reasons).  I tested a document that passed some pretty strict validation and was showing up fine in Mozilla, [...]

If you are a reasonable Perlista, the first thing you will do when you have to do some modest but non-trivial munging of data locked up in XML is to use XML::Simple.  The API is nearly perfect (absent the lack of some defaults that could be more helpfully set for strictness) for purposes of comprehensibility [...]