Month: June 2009

In the aftermath of the InformationFlash plagiarism incident, several questions have come up from the site’s webmaster and from other bloggers. Is it okay if the plagiarizer isn’t making money? No.  Authors work really, really hard to create their original content.  Seeing someone else pass it off as their own, whether there’s a charge or…

If your copyrighted blog content shows up in whole on another site without proper attribution like InformationFlash.com is doing, here’s a few steps you can take. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), so YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Send the Webmaster a Cease & Desist Letter Get a sample cease & desist letter and tailor…

I’ve been joking a lot on Twitter about the passing of the King of Pop.  Somewhere between the Jesus Juice and the Elephant Man, he’d lost a lot of credibility in his fading years.  Earlier in both of our lives, though, things were different. This Had Me Written All Over It In middle school when…

Yesterday, Kevin Kline ran across the WeFollow list of top twitterers for the SQL tag and remarked: How to Climb a Mountain I hear that same question privately every now and then, and it’s not that hard.  I’ve got the simple answers to get yourself to the top of the popularity list! Set Up Searches…

Opinion poll time!  I got asked a few questions, and I’m curious about what the rest of you think: Question 1: How do you feel about Run Book Automation for databases? Have you used it?  Would you want to?  Why or why not?  If you’ve never done it and never would, please respond too –…

I took the StackOverflow database dump, brought it into SQL Server, and did some slicing and dicing by tags and users.  I wanted to find the answers to questions like: What are the most active tags? Who is submitting the most answers? Who is getting the most answers accepted? What tag answers get the highest…

The first stage of mining is a dirty, ugly business. My Datacenter Miners don’t emerge from tunnels bearing armfuls of shiny diamonds.  They come out with filthy, misshapen rocks that might be something valuable – but might be worthless junk.  There’s no way to tell what you’ve really got until you’ve spent some time analyzing…

Tim Ford (Twitter – Blog) posed an excellent question in a blog entry called “Give Me a Coconut and Six Months“: Hold All My Calls “So You’re On A Deserted Island With WiFi and you’re still on the clock at work.  Okay, so not a very good situational exercise here, but let’s roll with it;…