http://www.wombatnation.com Speech Applications, Soccer, Hacking, Intellectual Property, and Incinerating Toilets Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:15:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some of wife's and my greatest memories (and stories) come from our travels in Bolivia. Today's NY Times has a really good article that focuses mostly on the salt flats near Uyuni and "The Death Road" from La Paz to Coroico. The Salar de Uyuni is so bizarre that I have ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/08/salt-flats-and-the-death-road-in-bolivia This year I attended presentations by the EBay engineering team at the MySQL Conference and JavaOne in which they talked about some very interesting patches that had made to MySQL Server. I lamented the fact that they hadn't open sourced it yet or contributed all the patches back to MySQL. ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/08/ebay-google-mysql-patches-and-drizzle Linden Street Brewery in Oakland has been throwing open houses on every Friday for the last 6 months or so, with free beer (two beers, usually their Common Lager and a beer from Drake's), free food (contributions to the basket by the taps help buy next week's food), and a ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/linden-street-on-first-friday Today I needed to make the same kind of update to a field in a few rows of a large database table. There were too many rows to do it with a separate SQL update statement per row, so I hunted down the MySQL REPLACE function. Okay, it was only ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/updating-substring-in-column-in-mysql While analyzing a bunch of US Census data at work to build out an even more comprehensive geographical database for Voxify's speech apps, I ran into an unexpected error. I wrote a Python script to parse a CSV file that contains population data from 2000 and estimates for 2001-2007. The ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/population-after-katrina Yesterday I rode the 60-mile route of the 2008 Healdsburg Harvest Century bike tour. Some friends and I did it at a very leisurely pace, finishing in a little over 4 hours, which included 20-30 minutes hanging out at the rest stops shoving down piles of food. Or at least ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/healdsburg-harvest-century-bike-tour Love this cartoon by Ben Sargent on the InBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch. Over the last few months I've turned on quite a few friends to the rich and varied aroma and flavors of Belgian beers. Although it's just a cartoon, I agree with William that you obviously shouldn't stereotype the ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/inbev-swallowing-busch Last Friday my wife and I celebrated our 15th anniversary by going to Linden Street Brewery for their Friday afternoon open house and then the Oakland Museum of California for the Best of the East Bay party. Both were excellent. Some of our friends brought a penne pasta salad with ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/best-of-the-east-bay We had a huge harvest from our Blenheim apricot tree four years ago, and this year the tree is bearing a similar amount of fruit. Rogue backyard animals got 30 or so, we've picked about 60 and I think there are another 75 apricots on what is now a very ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/blenheims-are-back Maybe this is the year I finally buy a cyclo-cross bike and experience the gut wrenching thrill of shouldering my bike up a steep, muddy hill, bouncing down trails through the trees, and then afterward drinking Belgian beers and eating grilled sausages with the people who lapped me repeatedly. The July ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/07/cyclo-cross