Oct 25, 2022Kate Sanchez and The Bealls: Why do they care so much?Something strange is afoot in California Republican circles. As usual, disgraced Rancho Santa Margarita city councilman Tony Beall and his wife (Assemblywoman Laurie Davies chief of staff) Jennifer Beall are in the middle of it all. We know that both Tony and Jennifer have been found guilty of campaign finance…Politics3 min readPolitics3 min read
Oct 13, 2022What The Heck Is PRQL?Introduction When I did my first “What The Heck Is…?” on DuckDB a few months ago, I expected that to be a one-off, but then I ran across Malloy and did another one. Now I’ve run across PRQL (pronounced Prequel) which stands for “Pipelined Relational Query Language”, and I’m wondering…Sql4 min readSql4 min read
Oct 12, 2022What Does 50% Electric Cars Mean To The Grid?Introduction In August of 2021, President Biden announced a goal to have 50% electric cars in the US by 2030. In mid-July of 2022, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg was at a hearing in the House and questioned on this goal and the practical problems. What was stunning in his responses is…Green Energy4 min readGreen Energy4 min read
Oct 10, 2022What The Heck is Malloy?Introduction I follow some very bright people on Linkedin and Twitter (about the only reason I’m on Twitter), and I learn about interesting tech and interesting use cases by random chance. The latest is Malloy, and as an added benefit, the example is going to include DuckDB. The intro paragraph…Sql5 min readSql5 min read
Jul 24, 2022Introducing the Gobol LanguageI was quite busy during Y2K fixing software systems (yes, they needed fixing, the only reason everything didn’t collapse is that a lot of people worked very hard to make sure it didn’t) and something that was always a big deal with EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). Not necessarily ANSI EDI…Etl4 min readEtl4 min read
Apr 26, 2022Jennifer Beall — Payroll Fraud?Remember when we broke the story about long, long, very long, time Rancho Santa Margarita city councilman/Mayor Tony Beall and his wife Jennifer Beall being found guilty of campaign finance violations? We also covered the shenanigans with her state representative puppet Laurie Davies. Who can forget her long list of…Tony Beall3 min readTony Beall3 min read
Nov 16, 2021Cleaner Air Through SoftwareWe just had a global meeting in Scotland on climate change and how to combat it. Whatever your position on the topic is, I remember clearly as a child in the 60’s and 70’s living near Los Angeles how the sky would be brown and my lungs would hurt if…Climate Change4 min readClimate Change4 min read
Oct 21, 2021Spotlight on UpsolverIntroduction Every day there is about three quintillion (a 3 followed by 18 zeroes) bytes of data created in this world, and only about 20% of it is structured in conventional data repositories and available to easily process. More and more often this data is stored in a Data Lake, which…Data Lake5 min readData Lake5 min read
Oct 21, 2021Councilwoman Carol Gamble has a long history of big words and no payoff.Councilwoman Carol Gamble has a long history of big words and no payoff. To give her credit, she was part of the group that got Rancho Santa Margarita turned into a city, I don’t know her exact contributions to that process but has spent the majority of the last two…Government Corruption4 min readGovernment Corruption4 min read
Aug 12, 2021Hey Google, Where’s the Search?Introduction Move to the cloud they said. It will be cheaper they said. It will be faster they said. It will be easier they said. Well, it’s possible for some of those things to be true, the “easier” part, not so much. AWS is pretty famously obfuscated in the way it…Ui Ux Design3 min readUi Ux Design3 min read
