Smileys  Tags: randomthought.
I'm fairly positive that at least 67% of the smileys were invented when inputting regular expressions.

Humans suck  Tags: other, randomthought, webdevelopment, real life.
Lately I've been working on two 'private' projects. Both failed due to human imprecision.

Firstly, I thought of something which might identify which song is playing in your head. You can't play it back (Shazam won't work), and most people don't want to sing it in front of the microphone on websites like Midomi. My system would recognise the tap pattern from a song. You'd drum your fingers on the desk or whereever, and it was supposed to search in all records for one that matches your drumming pattern.
Before I really got far with it, I discovered the drumming pattern was too variable to ever work.

Fastest SELECT query  Tags: databases, webdevelopment, programming.
Just a quick post about some speedtests I did. I couldn't quickly find which way was the fastest.

TABLE t: col1, col2, col3, col4, col5 (a mix of integers and varchars)

SELECT * FROM t
Run 1: 3.722 miliseconds

Define: The cloud  Tags: webdevelopment, computers, networking.
According to Wikipedia, this is the definition of "Cloud Computing". The new kid on the block, something overhyped that nobody understands.
"Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network (typically the Internet)."

(Note that SaaS is a known term among both IT people

Hyphen or dash?  Tags: writing.
I have read about the difference before, but I forgot again (I even forgot that what I called a dash was actually a hyphen). Most texts explaining it are way too long to remember. People end up using one or sometimes two hyphens, only differentiating between a hypen and an em dash, if they differentiate between anything at all.

This post is a short summary of when to use a hyphen, an en dash and an em dash.