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On August 17, 2009, newspapers around the United States published photos of the First Family peering over the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, part of a summer trip to the West. They, like so many families who had visited the canyon before and would continue to come in the times ahead, seemed captivated by the magnificence of the sight before...

In Henry Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones, the young hero and his friend Partridge go to see a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a play that had been around for less than 50 years at that point. Partridge, always opinionated and usually wrong, is not impressed by the actor playing Hamlet: “Why, I could act as well as...

In fact, PHP is now in the top five most popular and most used languages according to a majority of...

Although the core of the SQL language remains relatively unchanged, the most recent release of the SQL standard (SQL:2008) includes two sets of extensions: 1) support for object-relational databases and 2) support for XML. The second edition of this book included some material about the object-relational extensions. However, that set of...

Imagine you're celebrating the start of the weekend with Friday-night drinks with a few friends. And then suddenly your phone rings -- one of the servers you administer has gone down, and it needs to be back up before tomorrow morning. So you drag yourself back to the office, only to discover that some log files have been growing more...

There you are at your desk, wanting to talk with your colleague Steve in another office about a new project you need his help on. You turn to your laptop, switch to a software program, and look at Steve’s presence info. The little bubble next to...

What you need to know to survive, long term.

Interests between broadcasters and telecom people are blurring. Technical operations and design engineers in one field are increasingly required to deal with practices and techniques in the other. The problem is expectations and terminology differences aren't recognized until...

In recent times, jQuery has proven...

Nicholas Argeneau was once a successful hunter who went after rogue vampires who broke the immortal law. Except no one has mentioned his name in the last fifty years, not since he turned into a rogue himself. But once a hunter, always a hunter. When...