Recent content by alcramer

Hi -- I think you need to think more deeply about your business model (Don't we all!). Try this: for 350$. you'll build a basic website for the client, based on 2 1 hour conversations with clients (one at start of project, the second at end, to pickup changes suggested by client). Anything...

We got our puppy chipped, in case she wandered away and got lost. That cost 60$ and the company that offers this service isn't some joke: it's endorsed by every high-end vet in the Northeast USA. But everytime we go to the vet, they ask: is she chipped? We say yes and they run a scanner over her...

This doesn't do a lot for me, probably because I'm taking it too seriously (I'm old, and at this stage in my life about all I believe in anymore is mathematics & love). But I did like the line "You are as essential to me as an element to a set". That's an interesting idea, both as regards math...

A very nice story. I was wondering what culture the writer was from? I'm from USA, and here we wouldn't wait 84 days for the first kiss -- one or the other person would decide the slow one wasn't really interested and would go find someone else. Thanks for posting!

In my experience, most people are quite willing to risk their lives to save something they really care about. People are always running back into burning buildings to save their cats or dogs. If they have kids, they won't even leave in the first place unless they know their children are out...

I don't hate anybody & I'm not keen on "nuking" anyone. The articles you cross ref'd were interesting but I'm not so certain of the accuracy of their content. Having said all that: I'm not a big Peta fan either. But I am a big fan of the various SPCA's (Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to...

Hi -- This thread starts: That presupposes there is a meaning. Won't we all be furious for that split second if there is nothing, no meaning, and we realise it? In Zen we work a lot with the Heart Sutra, that teaches: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. That's not the same as saying there is...

I'm a self-employed software engineer developing a new technology that will eventually make me a lot of money. I hope. Recently I've been a bit discouraged -- horrible economy, & I'm having trouble re-inventing myself as a marketing person -- so I paid myself a 1 million dollar retention bonus...

Hi-- Don't know if this helps -- you may already have discovered this -- but x10hosting is a little funny about where they want you to upload your Perl scripts. A common practice is to put them in some subdirectory "cgi-bin" of your root public directory (by "root public directory" I just mean...

Kayos -- maybe you should explore Hinduism? We think there's lots of Gods (last count: > 2 billion). We're free to worship whichever we want; this business of who's greater/bigger/better is up to them to sort out, not us... Regards, Al

At the moment we're in the middle of a period of what ecologists call "massive die-backs", and what paleontologists call "mass extinctions". I personally doubt the human race is gonna make it through, which is a very sad thing, but maybe not unjust when you consider this is largely caused by our...

Hi Mike -- Implementing a SOAP service in C/C++/C# (or any other compiled language) is problematical: whoever is hosting your service has to let you compile (and then run) your code on their machine. (Compile-on-my machine, then upload-and-run-on-your-machine is also possible, but even harder to...

If you're involved in any kind of tech/scientific/math work that needs a bit of creativity, long walks can provide a wonderful setting to make the little breakthroughs that you need to keep things happening. When I was working for software companies, I was only in the office about half the time...

They should talk. When the leaders of countries don't talk, it's always us -- the people they're supposed to be leading -- who wind up paying the price (getting blown up, coming back from some foriegn war missing our legs, etc. etc. etc.)

iframes can be useful. You shouldn't use them to format static html: tables & cells are the right to do that instead of iframes. But if you're building a web app that requires the notion of "session", you may need to use frames to 1. preserve/manipulate state info on on the client side; and/or...