Pseudorandom

Live Oil Spill Information

tclark — Wed, 26 May 2010 22:06:58 +0000

Slides From my MySQL Tuning talk at CPOSC

tclark — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:25:28 +0000

Here are the slides from my October 17 CPOSC talk on MySQL performance tuning.(Open Document format)

New FRONTLINE on Tuesday – Obama’s War

tclark — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:27:22 +0000

Our Travel Plans

tclark — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:06:24 +0000

Not content to hang around at home, we’ve planned a little trip. For kicks, I’ve mapped out our itinerary

View Our travel plans in a larger map

Pictures from Colorado

tclark — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:27:22 +0000

I got some good pictures during our recent trip to Boulder in spite of losing the camera for about two days.

Kids ready to make smores

Max and his friend Derek explore.

Josie points out some of the highlights of the Denver aquarium.

Rails: First Impressions

tclark — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:36:40 +0000

Due primarily to overwhelming peer pressure, I’m finally trying Ruby on Rails. Overall, it’s living up to its reputation. Rails makes it very easy and fast to get a web application off the ground and it gets the boring, repetitive code out of my way so that I can focus on the interesting parts of an application. Ruby itself is a very nice language. It lets me write powerful and concise code, a la Perl. At the same time the code is attractive and readable, like Python.

Rails exhibits one of my favorite principles of system design: The right way to do things should also be the easy way. Web developers should seperate presentation and logic, and with Rails that’s the easiest way to code an application. You would have to do extra work to mix the two. Developers should do unit and functional tests, and Rails includes tools to make it easy to do so.

While I recommend that any web developer should check out Ruby on Rails, I’d especially like to recommend that new or aspiring web developers give it a try. The structure of Rails encourages and supports good development practices, so a new developer can learn them while learning Rails at the same time. Those good coding habits will then carry over to other development environments when it becomes necessary to use them.

Easter Egg Hunting

tclark — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:41:02 +0000

This year all three kids went out for the Easter egg hunt. Overall the results were pretty good.

Max lost valuable time fumbling with his bag this year. Look for him to return next year with a basket or bucket.

Adair's egg hunting performance improved greatly since last year and she was happy with a new PR.

Josie demonstrated her strong egg hunting potential during her rookie debut. This should be the first of a long string of successful egg hunts for her.

Josie’s First Visit to the ER

tclark — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:39:45 +0000

Josie ran smack into the corner of a desk on Saturday and split her forehead open. She calmed down pretty quickly, but Lisa and I realized that this injury needed a little more than a simple band-aid.

After a long wait at the emergency room, where Josie and I watched the Villanova-Pitt game, I was pleased to learn that Josie would not need stitches. Instead they glued her wound with some nifty stuff called dermabond.

Josie glued back together

As emergency room visits go, this was a pretty easy one.

Pictures from the Keys

tclark — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:02:54 +0000

We all had a good week in the keys. The kids especially enjoyed the chance to play outside in the sun.

Adair waits for her maki.

Young man and the sea.

Josie catching some rays.

American Hops – A New Online Video Series

tclark — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:00:11 +0000

I am a huge beer fan and enjoy checking out the local beers wherever I go. American Hops is a new online video series that looks at some of the thankfully large and growing number of craft beers made around the United States. Their first episode features Pennsylvania’s Stoudt’s Brewery.