http://blog.mikezhang.com thoughts of michael xiaoquan zhang professor at hkust Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:55:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/09/19/pic-a-day-roof It has been a headache to do decimal point alignment in latex. Fortunately, there is a package called dcolumn that helps with this problem. This dcolumn package "defines a system for defining columns of entries in an array or tabular which are to be aligned on a ‘decimal point’." Unfortunately, it is very ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/09/08/decimal-point-alignment-in-latex It's that simple: use DBI; my $conn = DBI->connect ("DBI:mysql:db","owner","ownerpass") or die("Cannot connect: $DBI::errstr"); $sql=qq(select field from table where id=$id); @array=@{$conn->selectcol_arrayref($sql)}; http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/09/06/perl-load-mysql-query-results-into-an-array There are more than two ways to do it. I just put down two quick ways. using reference to array not using reference to array Method 1: In program: processarray(\@array); In sub processarray: my $arrayref=shift; my @array=@$arrayref; Method 2: In program: ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/09/06/passing-array-as-a-parameter-in-perl The difference between a smart person and a wise person is that a wise person knows how not to get into situations that a smart person knows how to get out of. http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/09/05/overhead-wise-vs-smart It is renovated when I visited. But I could manage to get a picture like this. http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/09/02/pic-a-day-palace-museum http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/08/29/pic-a-day-lantern-of-double-happiness Google blog posted an article on "Strengthening the Study of Computer Science". It started with: At a time when more and more digital technologies are becoming indispensable to millions of people, the field of computer science (CS) is in trouble. Enrollment and retention of CS students, particularly those historically underrepresented in the ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/08/29/political-correctness-at-google Read from a file, and write out. Just put it here for my own reference. #!/usr/bin/perl $data_file="file.csv"; open(DAT, $data_file) || die("Could not open file!"); @raw_data=; close(DAT); #print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; #print ""; foreach $lines (@raw_data) { chomp($lines); ($var1,$var2,$var2)=split(/\|/,$lines); print "$var1,$var2,$var3\n"; # print " \n"; } #print ""; http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/08/28/perl-reading-a-file Photo of Yang Yilin, One of the Gold Medal Winning Gymnast After I wrote a post and complained about Levitt's  un-scientific  way of making ungrounded statements, I received a comment from the original data analyst Chris Bourdon. To make the reply more visible, I put it here, and it gives a ... http://blog.mikezhang.com/2008/08/26/more-on-the-age-of-gymnasts-a-reply-to-chris-bourdon