Jeff Davis has written a superb article about the problems with NULL in SQL. He has it exactly right when he says:

I think the best way to think about NULL is as a Frankenstein monster of several philosophies and systems stitched together by a series of special cases.

The closest single operational definition of NULL I

For the last few months, I've been honored to videotape PostgreSQL events. The last one was PGDay San Jose 2009, which was the day before the start of the 2009 OSCON. I didn't attend OSCON this year, in part because one of the great pleasures of OSCON for me was getting to go to Portland; visiting San Jose just isn't

So, I’ve settled on Mercurial as my VCS for my current software development. I looked at Git and Bazaar, and decided that Mercurial met my needs as closely as anything did. Git is, I’m sure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but the documentation and cultural milieu were quite oft-putting; it’s like when you joined the computer

Tony [Comstock] has described Google as “lazy” for various sins: The sex-negative algorithm changes, considering [penis] a less naughty word than [clitoris], and so forth. And he has a good point.

But, really, aren’t we the lazy ones?

Just like Homo Sapiens has trouble imagining geological time, Homo Internetica has trouble imagining time periods more than a couple

That which only exists on one disk, you do not truly possess

Recently, the very cool video side Vimeo announced that they would no longer be allowing videos which were just samples of the gameplay of video games. Needless to say, howling and gnashing of teeth followed. I don’t have a strong opinion on it either way (except

A friend of mine once bought a $200 beater car. On the way to a very, very important job interview, this $200 car broke down on the freeway. My friend blamed this on “bad luck.”

Needless to say, this was not truly bad luck.

A server failing is not “bad luck.” Computers fail. All the time. Bad luck

If a service is available to the general public, it is not in “beta.” It has been deployed. Excusing problems by slapping a “beta” on it is simply immature.

From a demo of PostGIS:

Presenter: “Of course, this is all fake data.”
Audience member: “I would have thought that the use of Godzilla would have indicated that it was all fake data.”

From the PostgreSQL day today at OSCON:

Q: “What did XML get you (in this design)?”
A: “XML got us pain.”

Never for a moment thinking it would be accepted, I sent in a proposal to the 4D Summit in October to give a talk about credit card processing using 4th Dimension. And, yet, it was accepted, so I guess I actually have to prepare something now. I’ll blog here about the presentation as it comes together.