From my friend Doug:

Given the radius of a pizza "z", and the thickness of the pizza "a", the
volume can be calculated as pi*z*z*a.

http://steampunkworkshop.com/daveveloz.shtml

A replacement for email? Finally? Google seems to be on track to reinventing not only email, but the complete web-based communication experience.

http://wave.google.com/

Oh, and for all you Firefly fans, notice that Google is appropriating the show's nomenclature of "sending a wave".

I'll drop this into the Inter-ether-pool. Maybe someone else will be inspired. It's a note I made some time ago. What could be done with this notion?

Better business through ceremony

There are better ways than this, especially in Ruby on Rails, but here's a manual idea for managing database changes during development.

• All database change scripts be put in _db directory
• Three kinds of scripts:
  • create_db.sql, which drops all existing database objects and creates the original schema.
  • alter_db_yyyymmddThhmmss.sql, which changes the schema.
  • update_db_yyyymmddThhmmss.sql, which changes the data.
• With this method, the entire schema can be recreated by running the scripts in order. (update_db is obviously a problem.)
• Scripts should run within transactions.