Thursday, November 20, 2008

T-SQL Mandelbrot

From The Daily WTF comes one of the most awesome and geeky things I've seen in a long time - the classic Mandelbrot set, generated in good ol' ASCII text using a single T-SQL select statement. Since it uses Common Table Expressions and the PIVOT command, it'll be for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 only.

The Mandelbrot set (not as ASCII art, though)

It's reassuring to know that somewhere out there are still some very interesting people with a lot of free time on their hands...

Monday, November 17, 2008

iSilo on the iPhone

One of the main reasons that I haven't bought an iPhone, apart from the hoops that you have to jump through to get it on the 3 network, is that it didn't support the iSilo document reader. Since iSilo is one of the main document formats for mobile devices (since the days of the Palm Pilot Professional - remember that?!), that would be a bit of a major pain, especially as most of the documents I read are in that format.

Fortunately after a lot of noise has been kicked up on the iSilo forums by iPhone/iPod Touch lovers, this application is now available from Apple's App Store.

One less reason now for me to get an iPhone!

UPDATE: oops, that last line should read, "One less reason now for me to not get an iPhone!".

Thursday, November 06, 2008

New blog

It's been a while since I posted, so just a quick passing comment - I've started a new blog, to track my progress reading through the New Testament over the next two years. If you're at all spiritually-minded, or just curious about what the Bible really says (because trust me, traditional Christianity is so often so wide of the mark), then please do drop by. I'll be updating once a week, God willing!