Catching the bus

Temporarily unavailable for yesterday's link roundup: Maciej Stachowski uncovers a frightening edge case: Firefox poops out when handed markup with <font> tags nested 158-deep.

Links roundup 3

• Brian Hayes works through Fawn Nguyen's multiplication problem for her sixth graders, and uses shoe-lacing diagrams to analyze the solution.
• Guy Fedorkow gives a virtual tour of the Computer History Museum's IBM 1401 mainframe, and delves into the intricacies of data processing with master and detail card decks.
• Congratulations to the inaugural winners of the Powerful Women Programmers award, 30 talented women from the D.C. area (including three of my past and present colleagues!) recognized by DCFemTech. 
• Colleague Davar Ardalan gives her take on digital storytelling.

Another opportunity to go Conrad on someone else's code

Remy Porter and RJ reveal a regular expression that might be longer than the texts it's matched against.

One of the WAVES

Gillian Jacobs directs The Queen of Code, a short film about Grace Hopper, pathfinder despite herself for women in computing. Two minor errors in the graphics (Fortran was not a computing business; the CO in COBOL stands for "Common"), but otherwise a good piece of work.

Fred Mallard lives

When I was a little kid of about 6 or 8, one day I wrote a letter to my mother (I think this was at a time when we didn't see each other every day). It's in one of her keepsake boxes for me. I wrote something like this: Dear Mom, How are you? I am fine. Today I had a 60/40 day. (I was a precocious squirt, and I was just getting glimmerings of the ideas [a] of relative proportions and [b] that daily life was not an unmixed joy.) 60 bad because I lost the room's kickball in the woods, (No fence around the playground.) And 40 good because I found it again.

Today was a 60/40 day. Except that, instead of the room's kickball, it was 83K rows from a key table in the central CMS database. A backup copy of the database, a magic Perl script, and the help of Jason, Stephen, Justin, Paul, and Jared, and the rows have been retrieved from the woods.