"I could never have completed this book without my family and, of course, without Helena. She was always there for me. When we went on vacations and I dragged along a suitcase full of books, cables, and a notebook computer, she calmly read her novel. She didn't say a word. Many times when the sun was shining outside and I was staring at the computer, she often came to me: "You have to have a walk!!!!" When she was vacuuming and made me lift my feet to clean under the table, to prevent suffocation from dust pollution, she just gave me a kiss. She didn't say a word. Then in the evenings when sitting in our living room, she always said she believed that everything would be fine. I didn't. She did. She was right. And she was always there."


i like this paragraph too:

"As I reflect on this project, I'm taken aback by the amount of work involved. Consider this: over 500,000 characters, each retyped at least twice, 2 years of writing, uncountable hours and nights spent over it. This works out to about 1,300 characters typed each day. The smallest revision number (the number of times a chapter has been revisited, reread, and changed) is 8, and the largest, 14. Conservatively speaking, we had to reread an average chapter 10 times before we were happy with it. This sums to 5 million characters read. A huge burden to go through Ñ 2 years of dedicated work by two experts Ñ and yet, in computer terms, only 500 KB read 10 times over. Having finished such a project, and after doing the previous calculations, I find it fascinating how easily we, in the database industry, talk about megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. And yet, in the end, it feels good to do such an exercise once in a while. It makes one humble; it made us better."


"Comparing a Set with Its Universe"

"Working with Duplicates"