Archive for October, 2007
Tech Support, circa 2007
Posted by rbpasker on October 21, 2007
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The Lower West Side
Posted by rbpasker on October 17, 2007
Curbed finally printed my letter. Its the middle article.
HUDSON SQUARE—While our neighborhood name poll rages a wee bit south, a Hudson Squarite wants to reclaim the retired LWS tag: “We live near Greenwich and Spring Streets, in the area west of Soho, south of the West Village, and north of TriBeCa, which you guys are calling ‘Hudson Square.’ The problem with that name is that it seems totally artificial. Nobody knows where it is, and why name an entire neighborhood after a tiny little park that no one visits? Other suggestions have been: West Soho and West of Varick (WeVar). My suggestion — which, because it seems obvious in hindsight, has to stick — is “Lower West Side.” isn’t the symmetry with UWS, UES, and LES beautiful? And geographically and descriptively, it fits perfectly.” We’re church-going boys, so if Trinity tell us it’s Hudson Square, it’s Hudson Square. [CurbedWire Inbox]
Some of the responses on the Curbed blog are delish! Nobody seems to like Hudson Square.
Question is, who the hell is this Trinity person?
Curbed: CurbedWire: Blaichman Targets West Village, Lower West Side Plea, I Hate Glass
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What’s an Outer Join?
Posted by rbpasker on October 15, 2007
This Article uses Venn diagrams to explain the mysteries of various types of SQL joins, and how to construct them.
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The Limits of Search
Posted by rbpasker on October 11, 2007
I got an email today asking me about a comment I had made in a 1992 letter to the editor of the New York times Book Review:
Could it be that ideologies, like “compound characterizations,” leak as well?
The writer asked what I meant by “compound characterizations” and, 15 years later, I had no idea. I figured it had something to do with the original Book Review article, but I couldn’t get the NY Times search engine to cough up the original article (and God forbid they should hyperlink letters to the articles to which they refer).
Here are the terms I tried: “William F. Buckley”, “Joseph A. Cincotti”, and “In Search of Anti-Semitism.”
I came up with lots of articles by and about both of the authors as well as a number of references to Buckley’s book, but none were the article by Nathan Glazer with Cincotti’s sidebar. I even narrowed the search to Sept. 1992, the date referenced in my letter.
What finally did it was searching for “compound characterizations” and “leak”.
The referenced article had both Buckley’s and Cincotti’s name, but they had not been indexed by the Times’ search engine.
For a full-text search system, I don’t know why my name and title searches failed to find the article.
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