Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

E is for Experts

I don't know everything. I do have a knack, however, for knowing who does. At least in certain areas. Therefore, I keep a handy-dandy little list in my head of who to turn to when I have a question, need an explanation, or want an expert opinion.

In the area of children in general and early childhood education in particular, there is simply no better resource than my dear Rachel. In matters of government, I turn to Craig. For matters judaic, it would be my friend Mitch and for musical theatre, my mother-in-law, Diane. If I wanted to know about PC hardware, especially graphics and such my pal Hal knows all that (and, actually, a whole lot more.)

This is a strategy that I heartily recommend to everyone -- don't get bogged down in the details (outside your own area of expertise, of course). Get to know who knows stuff and make some mental bookmarks, just as you would bookmark a particularly helpful, informative, or insightful website. The old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is definitely true.

[ Posted: 22:00 | comments: 2 | print ]

D is for Dubya

Or Dumbass, same thing. Okay, I couldn't stomach listening to the speech last night. I did read up on it, however, and have a couple of comments.

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[ Posted: 18:00 | comments: 1 | print ]

C is for CopyLib

The other day, I was in need of a snippet of code -- specifically, a Perl routine to check that an e-mail address has a valid format -- and it occurred to me that while there are websites out there that host libraries of free and commercial programs and such, I had never seen one that fulfilled the role of a CopyLib.

For those to young to know, a CopyLib is simply a shared library of record layouts, code snippets, and subroutines that can be referenced in a program and included at compile time. It's a concept I know from COBOL, but it may have found its way into other languages. The real impetus for using a CopyLib is laziness, but we've sold the concept to management by pointing out that it establishes consistency across programs and applications, extracts core business logic into a centralized repository, and makes programs more easily maintained by modularizing details.

What I was thinking of was a repository of stuff that would commonly go into a CopyLib. The regexp I found for validating an e-mail address, for example, would be a prime candidate. There would be different categories for different languages and subcategories for topics like record layouts, TCP/IP and sockets, file handling, graphics, user interface, and so on.

It could even be done easily with Blosxom. I checked, and, as of this morning, copylib.com is available. But do I really need another project? Could I sneak yet another domain registration fee past Rachel? I think I'm going to have to let this one slide, I'm afraid. But, if someone wants to pick up on the idea, I'd be happy to share my thoughts on the project.

[ Posted: 08:00 | comments: 0 | print ]