We maintain this site with Perl Template Toolkit. Depending on how you want to use it, TTK is either a souped-up templating program or a souped-down content management system. Big, dynamic, content-rich websites using it include the popular IT news site Slashdot and the BBC.
With templates, you can see the structure of a page, [...]
When you ask a database for information, the result of the query is a table or “rowset”. People who are good at database management write queries that slice and dice multiple tables, perform calculations on data, and format it all before it ever gets reported back.
I’m not one of the people who are good at [...]
Sometimes it makes sense to create an animation in Flash and then to embed it in PowerPoint. Here are some instructions I wrote up a while back. The screen grabs are from an earlier version of PowerPoint, but PowerPoint 2007 looks the same.
1). Go to the slide where you want the Flash animation [...]
The idea of randomness seems to be in the air. The difficulty human beings have in achieving true randomness is an important clue in One Shot, the Lee Child thriller (”Reacher said nothing”) I listened to recently on a trip to Vermont. Probability, randomness’s opposite number, is the subject of The Drunkard’s Walk [...]
One of our clients asked us to write down some questions, so that the people providing us with background info could be prepared when we call. We don’t like to come on like a pop quiz, and we don’t normally require any advance prep. We just try to keep up our end of a [...]