Archive for September 2009
Gilligan goes to the movies
Last night, Amanda, Max and I went to see Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. It was a funny movie, but funnier was the guy I met at the concession stand. He was very thin and dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt and a black vest. He looked a lot like an older Gilligan with bushy eyebrows that stood out about an inch and a half from his his forehead. He sidled up to the concession stand and peered into the [...]
Zen Cynicism: maitri
There was a story about the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. This was a situation where his students had been sitting and they were 3 or 4 hours into a very hard sitting period, a sesshin. The person who told the story said every bone in his body was hurting, his back, his ankles, his neck, his head, everything hurt. Not only that, his thoughts were totally obsessed with either “I can’t do this, I’m worthless. There’s something wrong [...]
The Mind Models of a Developer
The Interpreter – sees role as interpreting the back end processes to the user – application is a specialized gui to the database
The Modeler – sees application as data, information that needs to be structured. Starts with models and relationships, then figures out the algorithms that will bridge and transform the data.
Winding road, developer’s job is to build roads into and out of the database.
Zen Unix Master – applications are tools in a box.
Graphs in the database: SQL meets social networks
Graphs are ubiquitous. Social or P2P networks, thesauri, route planning systems, recommendation systems, collaborative filtering, even the World Wide Web itself is ultimately a graph! Given their importance, it’s surely worth spending some time in studying some algorithms and models to represent and work with them effectively. In this short article, we’re going to see how we can store a graph in a DBMS.
A follow up to: Trees in the database: Advanced data structures