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.