I'd rather play golf

Congratulations to John Graham-Cumming for organizing the petition for a formal apology to Alan Turing for his treatment by the British government after the Second World War, which led to his subsequent suicide in 1954. This past Thursday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued that long-overdue apology, in response to the overwhelming numbers (30,000) who [...]

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I’d like to remind everyone that tomorrow, November 11, is Remembrance Day in Canada, Britain, and other countries around the world. It is an opportunity to reflect on the horror of war and to remember the sacrifice made by so many Canadians in the wars and peacekeeping missions of this and the past century. Remembrance [...]

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This latest attempt at the holy grail of theoretical Computer Science, a proof that the complexity classes P and NP are equal (or not), caused a bit of a stir around the office this week. It’s not only that as Computer Scientists we are interested in the problem, but also because one of our former [...]

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According to Dries Buytaert, the creator of the web-based CMS framework Drupal, and his colleague Benjamin Schrauwen, some 80 percent of all blog comments worldwide are spam. As unfortunate as this is, the number isn’t a surprise to me since I have to manually deal with spam comments everyday that break through the spam filter [...]

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Yesterday I attended the Fourth Annual DaMoN Workshop (Data Management on New Hardware), co-located with ACM SIGMOD and chaired by Ken Ross of Columbia University. I found the keynote talk on the Galois Project by Keshav Pingali, the Moncrief Chair of Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, particularly interesting. In his talk, Pingali [...]

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In my first blog post I mentioned that I learned to be a DBA with IMS/VS on IBM mainframes, and subsequently on DB2. What I didn’t mention is that my wife Leslie is a DBA for both DB2 V8 (on IBM mainframes) and Microsoft SQL Server. This situation keeps me, er, rooted in the life [...]

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