The late Jerry McBride, founder of the Marist College information systems program and mentor to many of us in it, gave our capstone class a bit of advice that I’ve always remembered:

“Never stop learning.”

Plenty of people, regardless of industry, argue otherwise. Play it safe, take few risks and stay with the tried and true — that keeps the bills paid and the lights on.

Decades ago, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM” was a phrase you could bank on. IBM had it all — the kings of the air-conditioned mainframe, making oodles of money, and very snug in their white-shirt-and-tie ways. But they were slow to learn. PCs came along, the mainframe business withered, OS/2 failed to unseat Windows, and tens of thousands of people in IBM-hometowns found themselves unemployed. IBM’s come back, but it’s nothing like the company it was in 1980.

Stop learning, rest on the existing models, and it’s easy to become a mainframe-hawker in a PC revolution. Or a railroad tycoon watching with disregard as Henry Ford mass produces Model T’s.

I’ve practiced Jerry McBride’s advice better at times than others. Lately, very much so. I’m on a learning jag. My latest quest is Ubuntu, Apache, PostgreSQL and Django. Last night, this little screen brought a smile or two:

P.S. My bookmarks and RSS feeds prove one thing: There’s no excuse for not learning; the Internet is the best free library you’ll ever find.

Apr 2, 2010 | Life, Programming
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For a session of five-minute “lightning talks” at this week’s 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Phoenix, I contributed “Five Essential Queries for SQL Server.” Aside from the basic SELECT statement, these are five techniques that, at least for me, either solved a tricky problem or made coding life more efficient. They came to me after some trial and error or from using the coder’s best friend, Google.

I realize that many journalists prefer the open source (free) MySQL to Microsoft’s product, so I’ve replicated the five queries below in MySQL syntax. You can download script files for either syntax here:

– Five essential queries (MS SQL Server)
– Five essential queries (MySQL)

Feedback and your ideas are welcome. Here they are:

1. Create a temporary table with identity column.
Temp tables are handy for storing and manipulating data when you need a table but don’t want to make it part of your actual schema. In SQL Server, the table variable is held in memory and disappears once the query finishes executing.
 

DECLARE @tmp TABLE (
   id INT IDENTITY(1,1), 
   FirstName VARCHAR(50)
   )
 
INSERT INTO @tmp (FirstName) VALUES ('Bob')
INSERT INTO @tmp (FirstName) VALUES ('Joe')
INSERT INTO @tmp (FirstName) VALUES ('Sally')
 
SELECT * FROM @tmp

(more…)

Mar 11, 2010 | Programming, SQL
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Building a WordPress theme from scratch has been a blast. Not only did I pick up new skills in CSS and PHP, I developed a deeper appreciation for the open source community. Without dozens of people who liberally share their code, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as fast.

So, I’d like to return the favor. Anyone who’d like my WordPress theme can have it. I have no illusions about being a designer, but if you’re looking to craft your own theme it’s a good start.

Download Portfolio_AD here.

Nov 23, 2009 | WordPress
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After working through a tutorial on building WordPress themes by wpdesigner.com, I had a basic, functional — and clunky looking — theme for my site. It had all the elements that I now understand to be the WordPress basics — a header, a content well for posts, a sidebar for links, pages and archives, plus a footer.

Everything worked, but it had no style.

Of course, the reason I set out to build a theme from scratch was to make something unique. I’ve been impressed, for example, at what the author of FlowingData has achieved using WordPress. And I like a good challenge.

So, I’ve spent the last few days digging into my CSS. I’ve used style sheets at work for internal projects I code in Visual Studio, so I have a head start. A reference CSS tutorial is handy for defining various elements, but I probably am learning the most by studying (and borrowing from) a couple of themes I’ve admired: Hemingway and Monochrome Lite.

If you know the Hemingway theme well, you’ll recognize shades of it in my  current header, which closely resembles the Hemingway header. I added a horizontal navigation bar that separates the top from the content to come. I’ve yet to style the content well, but I did decide to create left, middle and right divs for blocks of content. More to come — and I definitely will have to ask for help with colors. It’s what I know the least about.

Aug 30, 2009 | Programming, WordPress
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After searching the Web for the right WordPress theme for my site, I realized that none fit what I wanted. Hemingway, which I discovered through Derek Willis’ site Fumblerooski, has the right vibe, but the layout is all wrong. So, I decided to learn how to build one from scratch.

What you see now (or, what you would have seen if you were here now), is the result of studiously following this detailed tutorial. I’m glad I slogged through it, because it largely demystified WordPress. The process gave me the same feeling I had when, as a geeky 12-year-old, I took apart my family’s lawnmower engine. Seeing the parts moving on the inside really helps.

Aug 24, 2009 | Programming, WordPress
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