"Mr.Baggins is guilty of some of the most egregious violations of International Law as expressed in the Court's founding documents and must be brought to answer for his inhumane actions," Sauron said from the cardboard box behind the Emyn Muil 7-11 he's been living in since the scandalous and irresponsible destruction of Sauron's Ruling Ring brought about the downfall of his Empire several years ago.

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.

Windows Really Good Edition.

Not new, but worth looking at again.

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.