I have mentioned SimpleParse before. Well, version 2 is out.
No chance to play with it as yet - I have taken the girls to visit their Gran in Newcastle. But I have no reason to suppose that it's any less cool than version 1. ;-)
A very interesting thread about sort algorithms over on Python-Dev. The Timbot in full flight!
Received via email. I don't know its providence.
Too Late to Switch to ILE?, at the iSeries Network, contends that if you are still using RPGIII, you will probably never move to RPGIV and ILE.
If you were to have started with RPGIV at V3R2, when it was first released, then the leap from RPGIII wasn't too big. But since then the gulf has widened considerably. Today's RPGIV wouldn't look anything like RPG to an RPGIII programmer.
This is true, I suppose, but I think that the bigger issue is attitude. Most iSeries developers are, uh, not exactly neophiles. RPGIII has always been good enough for them in the past, so it's good enough for them now.
Outside the iSeries world, the machine is seen as old fashioned. Which is a shame, 'cos it's a superb box for business, and it isn't old fashioned at all. But the uses to which it is usually put are, and that is where the reputation comes from, I think.
Ah well. Anyway, another interesting RPG article today - Generate random numbers using RPG.
A very cool online Lunar Lander game.
Via The Ultimate Insult.
Another good one - Crazy Cars.
Update 26th July: And another one - Trackwars.
All these online Flash games remind me of old Speckie games - basic, but fun.
I wonder which foreign nation we'll allow to get the jump on us in this technology of our invention?
(Via The Shifted Librarian.)
Via b3ta.
Also from b3ta - the 500 most popular sites on the Internet. According to who? I've not heard of most of them.
Update 26th July:
src="http://blog.hotornot.com/js/rate/?eid=KQG&key=XHWF&histogram=1">
Kisco is making some of its utilities available for free. (That's free as in beer, not free as in speech.)
SMARTTTN is a set of mini-apps for green screen users - calculator, calendar, note pad, that sort of thing.
CPYFSEL is a smart file copy utility.
BTW, not new, but very useful - the WRKDBF file editor. Well worth a look.
Useful little RPG tip - Using environment variables with ILE-RPG.
Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Ed, is out. The author explains What's New with Regular Expressions.
Python and Java coverage much expanded, apparently.
Update August 30th: Order placed with Computer Manuals.
No, not a new Microsoft OS. It's not that big a disaster. It's an Earth threatening asteroid.
0.06 on the Palermo technical scale, out of 10. What does that mean?
Open Source Software Use Within UK Government.
See also The Register's coverage, and the Slashdot discussion.
So, while we are not up there with Peru just yet, things are heading in the right direction.
Working the Eclipse Platform describes the basic structure of the Eclipse platform and how it operates.
The Yanks are up in arms about it, naturally. "Other nations shouldn't be allowed to impose their laws on our citizens! Only we should be able to do that sort of thing!"
More light than heat at Slashdot, for a change.
Via chris.carline.org.
This one is good, too.
But don't look at this one. Trust me, you don't want to see it.
evolt.org's Submission Style Guide: Code is an excelent 1 page HTML style guide.
Via Babu.
See also Dive Into Accessibility. There is no excuse for an inacessable website. Not any more.
YellowTimes.org seems to take a balanced view . So naturally, they get called anti-Semites.
Six Degrees of Separation: An Urban Myth?
Via b3ta.
Israel kills twelve, including 8 children. "A great success", according to Ariel Sharon.
Naturally, this isn't terrorism. Oh no, if the bomb comes from a warplane, it can't be terrorism, can it?
War crimes, then?
Hamas will strike back, as night follows day, and more innocents will die.
None of this is surprising, of course. Inevitable after the Bush proposal.
There are voices of sanity, but they seem to be few. "The use of violence as a means of solving problems is demeaning to us as human beings. Attacking civilians of any kind anywhere is totally unacceptable."
It's clear to be that both sides are in the wrong. If I'm a little more harsh towards Israel, it's because I am part Jewish myself. If the Jews havn't learned the importance of humanity, what hope is there?
Heartless Bitches International.
Why don't they like nice guys? 'Cos they are all witches. That's why.
Seriously, it's an interesting thesis, but I don't actually believe the central 'nice guys are all insecure and needy' idea.
Second law of thermodynamics "broken".
I'm in two minds about this one. On the one hand, the 2nd law was only ever a statistical law - Entropy can decrease, it is just that it is vanishingly unlikely to happen. So unlikely, in fact, that in practice it never does. But there is no reason why a special set of circumstances, like the one set up by the researchers, shouldn't work in a different way.
On the other hand, Holy Shit!
Update July 24th: BBC coverage. The idea here is that at molecular scales and over extremely short periods of time, the 2nd law doesn't necessarily hold - this is the Fluctuation Theorem. The Australian team has now demonstrated this experimentally. There is no implication for large scale physics, but nanotech might have to take account of this effect.
I have come across The Official Ninja Webpage before, but I lost the URL. Found it again on SubAverage. It's a small net, after all...
Building GUI Applications with PythonCard and PyCrust.
Looks interesting. I've not tried PythonCard. Most of my GUI building is in Java, and it's a pig. Anything to make it easier can only be a good thing.
The seperation of the GUI logic from the GUI layout can only be a good thing. If it works, that is. Layout managers can be a royal pain (especially if you have to write your own to get the layout that you want), but they are powerful. For example, making resizing work they way that you want it to work relies of this level of control.
Jaguaro.org's One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately is an interesting list.
But there are some good albums listed - The Police - Synchronicity, Derek and the Dominoes - Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Dave Brubeck - Take Five, John Coltrane - Giant Steps, Tori Amos - Under the Pink, Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band.
Well, I like them.
And does anyone actually have Celine Dion - Colour of My Love?
(Via SubAverage)
The Heavy Metal Song Title Generator.
Via The Ultimate Insult.
Wall Street Suffers Worst Setback Since Yesterday. Once again, SatireWire is on the button.
See also:
Airline's New "Fly, Goddamnit" Campaign Not Taking Off
NASA Just Goes Ahead and Launches Satellite
Warchalking is all the rage at the moment. Now, here comes pubchalking.
Warchalking, it seems, is so cool it doesn't even matter if anyone is really doing it or not. From Wired.
(Via dutchbint.)
It's all here, so far as I can tell. Monty Python TV Series Sketches. Brilliant.
iSeries Toolbox for Java: Running an iSeries Command.
There is a bit more to it than you'd think, but it's all covered here.
A couple of interesting Cellular Automata sites:
Just in case I'm not the only one who finds this stuff interesting.
Also interesting: Generation5. Lots of AI stuff here.
I come across a couple of partially Python related weblogs today, both UK based:
Both interesting reads.
I wonder if there should be a Python related web logs page on python.org?
VNC is a very useful cross-platform remote control system, allowing you to control one computer from another in a browser window. Open source, too.
Update 5th August: TightVNC is an enhanced version of VNC, also free.
Strategic Commander 1.1 for Palm is in beta.
It's a fab game. It's one of two games which I play a lot (along with Space Trader).
The new stuff in version 1.1 consists of:
There are some other changes which I would very much like to see:
That's it in terms of UI enhancements. As for gameplay enhancements, well...:
Not too much to ask for version 1.2, is it? ;-)
Oh, one other thing. I don't have a hi-res palm, so I wouldn't benefit, but Strategic Commander is crying out for a hi-res mode.
Paul Boddie's Python Web Frameworks Overview has moved to the new Python Wiki.
GadflyB5 (so named because Richard Jones prefers Babylon 5 to The Next Generation) version 1.0 is out.
Gadfly is an RDBMS. It isn't ACID, and it doesn't scale well, so it isn't going to replace UDB/400 any time soon. But it is fast, simple, free, and in pure Python.
This Excerpt from The New Rulers of the World, by John Pilger argues that the US is itself the ultimate terrorist.
5000 civilians killed in the name of peace.
Via my 2p.
The United States will continue to decline as a decisive force in world affairs over the next decade.
Via CamWorld.
Mark Pilgrim's PyAmazon allows you to search Amazon by a variety or criteria, and returns standard Python objects. Cool!
An intertesting thread on c.l.py.
Python is difficult to read? Bwahahahahaha!
The resulting Python at a Glance document is a very good summary.
An interesting article explaining prototyping of parameters in RPG IV.
Death to PLISTs! Who Knew You Could Do That with RPG IV? A Sorcerer's Guide to System Access and More is an absolute must-read for RPG IV developers.
Also worth a look: Until such a time as we all start using Eclipse do develop our iSeries software, defining your own SEU commands is still a worthwhile hack.
Generator-based state machines is another of Dave Mertz's articles about generators and iterators.
Superb! Gerhard Kalab has started work on a Python plugin for Eclipse!
Early days yet, mind you, but excellent news nevertheless.
It was a dark and stormy night.
The blood dripped from his nose like hot grease from a roasting bratwurst pierced with a fork except that grease isn't red and the blood wasn't that hot and it wasn't a fork that poked him in the nose but there was a faint aroma of nutmeg in the air and it is of noses we speak not to mention that if you looked at it in the right profile, his nose did sort of look like a sausage.
Joel reviews Robert D. Austin's Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. Interesting for managers of any knowledge workers, not just Software developers.
See also David Aaronovitch's We all end up losing if we play the blame game.
Via intergalactic.nu.
Some Pointers on Using Pointers in RPG IV.
I have to say, I find it a bit bizarre that just as so many modern languages (Java, Python) were doing away with the concept of pointers (as opposed to references, i.e. pointers without the arithmetic), IBM were busy adding them to RPG.
You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time. - Bertrand Meyer, 1989
Having said that, there are things in RPG that you can only do using pointers, and some that are much more efficient using pointers, so their use cannot be ruled out altogether. And OS/400 won't let you fandango on core.
Python in the enterprise: Pros and cons at builder.com lists, uh, the pros and cons of Python in the enterprise.
I'm not sure about the primitive SQL support thing, but other than that, it seems fair enough.
Tim Couper's "Selling Python to a Fortune 500 Company" presentation at the Python UK conference covered similar ground. But that isn't online.
Update: The c.l.py thread discussing this.
The weblog guide at Guardian Unlimited discusses British blogs, which are pretty popular at the moment as I have previously pointed out.
Via Off on a Tangent.
Bitter Java is available for free download.
I have heard good things about this book, so I'm looking forward to having a look.
I prefer dead-tree books, though, so if it is good, I'll almost certainly buy it. I have before.
Update 23rd July: It is good, and I did buy it.
Two main threads to my feelings. First, it is a great book for learning about patterns, if you are a J3EE developer, because it is so practical and hands-on.
Secondly, I get a bad feeling about my current project, because we have fallen into so many of the traps written about in this book. (We are not pooling connections, and our caching will leak memory.) Still, at least I know how to fix it!
Google too busy? Try elgooG.
Via Memepool.
An interesting list of Biblical contradictions on the American atheists site.
Via FARK.
PyUT is a UML class diagram editor with Python and Java round-trip support.
Or it will be...
It's going to be good, though - see the features list and screenshots.
IBM has sold some of its iSeries Model 890 "Regatta-H" servers, according to the iSeries Network and The Register.
I'm on holiday until the 15th, so expect few if any posts until then.
raising hell is a parent oriented blog, and Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think! is a Paris based blog, "striking news about beautiful women". Both subjects of interest to me!
Oh yes, also interesting - the Picture of Weblogs.
Chris Liechti has a PythonWin patch for nrunning scripts as an external process.
I havn't tried this out yet, 'cos I'm Javaing today. Cool though.
(Via The Ultimate Insult)
"we're every bit as incompetent as any male-owned firm."
I didn't think that Lawyers were allowed to be this honest.
(Via memepool)
What would happen if the moon crashed into the earth?
And what and when is a blue moon?
Aaron Swartz has put a superb HTML to text conversion utility up on his weblog.
See also License Haiku.
(Via Boing Boing)
Some chap called Hide has put some fabulous icons up on his site for download. Free for non-commercial use.
I'm probably not going to use any icons on this site - I prefer a text based look. But if I were to use any icons, Hide's would be the ones. They are superb - clean, colourful and easily recognizable. Check out the Thunderbirds!
(Via Life As It Happens)
In Top of the Heap, David Gallagher talks about his quest to become the top David Gallagher in Google (which he is), then the top David (which he isn't).
I'm the top Simon Brunning. But then I'm the only Simon Brunning, so that isn't saying much. I don't show up under Simon at all, so far as I can see. But there are over four million hits - I'm probably in there somewhere.
Peter Parker knows it. So why doesn't George Bush Jr.?
Kyoto was bad enough. But now there is the ICC.
Not to mention meddling in the Middle East, the ICBL, steel tariffs, missile testing, the Guantanamo Prisoners, the list goes on and on.
Of course, the US is by far the most powerful nation in the world, so they cannot be coerced into behaving reasonably. But there is no point Americans wingeing about being unpopular abroad...
Update 4 July: Looks like the Mirror has been reading my site. ;-)
The UK blogging seems to be thriving. You can find a pretty good list at GBLogs. They also keep a list of recently updated UK blogs.
A list of the 40 most popular (as in most linked to) blogs is on troubled diva, and blogjam has BLOGPOP, listing the most popular by traffic.
I make neither list, which is probably due to the fact that no one visits my site 'cos it's so tedeous.
Another good place for finding UK blogs is the London Bloggers Tube Map, which I have mentioned before.
I have found some interesting blogs through these sites:
Non UK specific weblog resources: Blogdex, Daypop and Weblogs.com.
Update 17th July: Hmmm. Perhaps The Edge of England's Sword is a little to the right after all.
The anti-Euro campaigners have some top names on-board - Bob Geldof, Harry Enfield, Rik Mayall, Vic Reeves, and Johnny Vaughan, for example. The sketch was certainly in poor taste, but that isn't the real issue so far as I am concerned.
The big deal is that these people - who don't know any more about the issues than we do - are using their celebrity to push their politics. What's going on?
As for Geldof, well, as David Aaronovitch says, It's as though Gandhi had taken up the fight against road humps.
Then there is Livingstone talking absolute bollocks. I'm almost speechless with anger that this idiot is giving advice on a subject that he clearly knows nothing about. MMR take-up is already at dangerous levels. He'd certainly have lost my vote, but for the fact that he never had it in the first place. (To be honest, I can't remember who I did vote for. That is how much of an impression the Lib-Dem candidate made. Decent people, the Lib-Dems, but rarely exciting.)
Update 04 July: Jesus wept, George Michael is at it now!
Apparently, the hurricanes which hit the U.S. start in the Sahara.
I'm surprised that Bush doesn't blame al-Qaeda, and bomb the place.
Mostly linked because of one line: a portly Sri Lankan batsman was asked by a South African why he was "so fucking fat". "Because," replied the batsman calmly, "every time I fuck your wife, she gives me a biscuit." Superb.
(Via Luke.)
Striving for Optimal Journal Performance on DB2 Universal Database for iSeries.
You don't need this. But if you do need it, you need it bad.
There has been a lot of discussion about metaclasses on c.l.py recently.
Ian McMeans asked for examples of the sort of thing that can best be done using metaclasses, and Mark McEahern demonstrates the use of metaclasses to implement aspect oriented programming in Python.
If this stuff makes your brains leak out of your ears, see Vladimir Marangozov's introduction to metaclasses. If it doesn't make your brains leak out of your ears, well, you are a lot cleverer than I am.
I linked to Jeff Epler's FinalMethods metaclass some time ago.
Aspect Oriented programming links here.
Tim O'Reilly (yes, that O'Reilly) contends that open source is alive and well, even though the same can't be said for many of the open source centered businesses.
International English from a British viewpoint.
Or go to a random entry. Nice site.
(Via Off On A Tangent.)
Survive If Your Parachute Fails to Open.
I bought my brother the dead-tree version of this some time ago. Now Worst Case Scenarios is online.
(Via The Ultimate Insult.)
One Company's Code Modernization Process at eServer magazine is a case study of the modernisation of a legacy iSeries application.
"We had a well-structured RPG program model that we’ve reused over and over again, so we knew how to tell user-interface subroutines from business- and editing-rule subroutines," Daniels explains. Sigh. Most of us don't have this, so we need RPG refactoring tools, about which I have ranted before.
Anyway, the interview with Alex Martelli is worth a read. Interesting chap.
Midrange Computing has an article, What's New with DB2 in V5R2.
I've mentioned some of the SQL enhancements before, but the MC article covers more, and give examples. I don't know about you, but I find examples so much easier to comprehend. There are also SQL enhancements mentioned that didn't make it to the IBM document - The CREATE TABLE LIKE command, and the more flexible ORDER BY clause. Genuinely useful stuff.
Also new at V5R2 is the JDBC 3.0 support.
Berkoff deported from US, because he overstayed his visa by one day five years ago.
Jesus. Talk about a jobsworth.
Well, just so long as we keep John Malkovich out of the UK until he stops issuing death threats.
According to The Indy, an academic study contends that Britain has passed the Chancellor's five tests.
So, when's the referendum? Bring it on!
Connection Pooling with Tomcat is just what I have been looking for - I've been trying to work this out for hours!
Dive into connection pooling with J2EE is a good follow-up read, but it doesn't have a simple step-by-step guide to getting started.
I've mentioned Palladium before, but the storm keeps on brewing.
Bob Cringely told us so. The Observer calls it World Domination, Release 4.0. Lots of stuff at WatchingMicrosoftLikeAHawk.com.
Clearly, Bill has been reading the Evil Overlord, 'cos he has a backup plan - to get root on eveyone's PCs.
Mathematical Lego Sculptures may take over from Var'aq (the Klingon programming language) as the nerdiest web page yet.
(Via SubAverage)
Update 03 July: Slashdot caught up eventually. ;-)
(It's a bit slashdotted, so be patient.)
See also the Slashdot coverage.
Nothing to report myself as yet - I'm still downloading!
Update: Downloaded & installed. I can't see anything different, but that's only to be expected, since I've been running a release candidate for a while.