A number of interesting Python bits and bobs.
Security Incidents in the EPA East Building
Man faces charges in guinea pig dissection
Via Fark.
I'm all for war on Iraq - but only if I see the evidence that Saddam is a threat.
David Aaronovitch is often a thought provoking read. He's not a knee-jerk pacifist - war is sometimes necessary. But the justification for an attack on Iraq has not been made public - or does not exist.
Will Blair go along with Bush? Opposition in the U.K. is mounting.
Not that Bush really cares about U.K. opinion, or anyone else's, for that matter, with the exception of his domestic audience.
This ILE business isn't simple. I know a lot of bright people who have had real problems moving across from RPGIII to RPGIV and ILE. So you can imagine the problems that not-so-bright people like me have had.
It's not the RPGIV part that's the problem, on the whole. RPGIV is just RPGIII dragged kicking and screaming into the nineteen-eighties. The thing that people have real problems with is ILE.
You can find a lot of good stuff in Who Knew You Could Do That with RPG IV? A Sorcerer's Guide. The first four chapters are essential reading for RPG programmers.
Adding Subprocedures to a Service Program is a nice little tutorial on binder language. You can use this to avoid the need for mass recompilation when you change a service program. It's knowing things like this which mean the difference between ILE being useful and being a complete nightmare.
Update (Frday) 13th of July: Reader Feedback and Insights: Binder Language clears up a few bits and bobs.
The Color Schemer is a superb tool for creating harmonious colour schemes.
Via Mark McEahern.
A New Direction for Web Services points out web services' Achilles heel - protocols.
Tools vendors have not, on the whole, implemented loose binding, because it's hard. So you need to write specific code for each protocol, so much of the hypothetical advantage of the web service approach is lost.
Why women make better managers
Women are more willing to explore compromise and to solicit other people's opinions. Is she kidding?
Via Babu.
Save time and aggravation -- automate FTP data transfers
Also worth a look: FTP save files GET as well as they PUT, Tricks and techniques for FTPing OS/400 save files and Change FTP server to use port other than 21.
I know about cygwin, but it's usually a lot more than you need. Unxutils has most of the tools that you really need, and it's just a 2 meg zip file.
Links to other good Windows utilities on the Unxutils page:
Java theory and practice: I have to document THAT?
Put your hands up, this is the code police. We know that you haven't been including package descriptions in your Javadocs. Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to wear earplugs?
Open Source OS/400: A Crazy Idea for Crazy Times
Stained glass in Turin Cathedral
Reminds me of a joke.
Not quite sure what to make of this.
Via b3ta.
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings.
See also Ook!, a programming language designed for orang-utans:
Java - who needs it?
Via iamcal.
"This does not happen very often in Northallerton."
It's a good thang that I don't have any good ideas, isn't it.
Sigh. I know that I've written about DB2 UDB enhancements at V5R2 again and again and again, but here is Port of Entry by Kent Milligan. This one is definitive.
Get started with Castor JDO - the basics of working with Castor JDO, an open source data-binding framework in 100 percent pure Java.
Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz's Yes You Can talks about generating PDF, specifically from Python.
It lead me to Etymon™ PJ Classic, though, an open source Java library for PDF generation.
Today is the UK's National Slacker Day! If only I'd known, I wouldn't have worked so bloody hard this morning. ;-)
Via Metafilter.
From football stadiums to hospitals, daily life in Ulster remains blighted by historic hatred, an interesting piece by David McKittrick in today's Independent.
The peace process is working - so far as the number of murders go, the figures speak for themselves. But there is a long way to go...
A guide to British pub etiquette
Perfectly serious, and very thorough. All visitors to the UK should read it!
Via iamcal.
It's OK to say "Because I said so!" to your child, according to the 'experts'.
Thank Christ for that!
I have to say, though, that I don't usually give too much credance to the so-called experts. Children are not all alike, and general rules don't always apply.
The only experts on Freja and Ella are my ex, Cath, and me.
See the Python South-East UK booze-up page for the date and venue of the next meeting. All welcome!
(Source, such as it is, here and here).
If you can suggest any better venues, please do. If you can suggest code improvements, likewise. ;-)
Interesting discussion on Slashdot - Who is Using Tomcat or Jetty in Production?
No one recommending Websphere, I notice.
We are using Tomcat for our latest product, but we haven't rolled out to our largest clients yet...
If we end up with scalability issues, there are some alternative J2EE servers mentioned here which we can look at.
I've been looking at JBoss anyhow. Tomcat gives you Servlets and JSPs, but not EJBs. JBoss gives you the whole J2EE stack.
This is why I disapprove of tee-total women.
Hmmm. I have just realized that I can't think of a single culture that doesn't either:
Coincidence? I think not. Any culture which forbade women from drinking but didn't arrange marriages would die out due to lack of childbirth.
Via Off on a Tangent.
Hopefully, last week's meeting will become a regular occurrence.
With that in mind, I modestly present boozeup.py, a function for generating the dates of our meetings. (The next is on the 12th of September.)
Needs a bit of testing, and I'll also wrap it up in a CGI, along with a venue generator. For this, I need 12 suggested venues, with a URL for each. A couple more near Paddington, perhaps one in Reading and another in Oxford, one in South London near the ReportLab boys, that sort of thing.
The last meeting was a blast. Chris Miles and I ended up going to Cubana and drinking cocktails. I was a bit woolly on Friday, I must say.
So, I only need 10 venues really - Cubana is a must, and I know South London pubs rather too well.
Urbanoids - you wern't planning on working this afternoon, were you?
Launcher X is in beta.
Aesthetics aside, there are few differences between Launcher X and Launcher III.
One nice thing though - applications copied to card are kept in a different directory to other files. When the card is scanned, it happens much faster than Launcher III can manage. Launcher III had to trawl through 30 MB of ebooks!
One thing I would have Really liked to see - when moving an application to a memory card, optionally allow prefs and databases to be moved too. If they were, they should be copied back to the handheld when the application is launched, just as the application itself is.
Yet more new information about DBG2 UDB for iSeries enhancements at V5R2.
This is on top of the earlier stuff. V5R2 is looking like a huge release for DB2 - possibly the biggest since the initial System/38 release all those years ago.
Scalar subselects are the kind of thing that don't look too exciting. Until you need them, that is, at which point you really need them.
Savepoints also look really handy, as do external UDTFs. UDTFs, User Defined Data Tables, allow you to treat the output of a program as an SQL table.
Temporary tables are somewhat useful - nothing you can't do by creating tables in QTEMP, but these will work cross-platform.
Also in The Four Hundred this week - a summary of the state of play with WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) and Eclipse for the iSeries, (no news here, but a nice summary anyway,) and an article explaining why companies should hire mediocre rather than talented people, which explains why I have a job.
Genuine, apparently, but I'm suspicious. Funny, though.
Via Sashinka.
Also funny - X4 Freight's "Financial situation".
What makes one really like some programming language?
Beyond technical details and empirical evaluations there is a religion-like feeling that one can get obsessed with. And I love the feeling. I just wish I could get rid of it.
This could be me...
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Take your bookworm readings. |
Via Cyn.
Also:
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What does my romance meter read? |
Is it any wonder that I'm single?
I don't have to use SEU very often any more, thank God. And soon, no one else will - either.
But nevertheless, this is a neat hack.
Update: the site seems to be down, so here's the google cache: http://google.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.400times.co.uk%2FFrameData%2FSEUCOLOR1.htm
Single Sign-on Support in V5R2. Very interesting...
I'm off to the Python UK booze up after work this evening - see you there!
You'll know me by my tin of Spam. No, really.
"CLEAR" advantage over resetting work fields discusses the CLEAR op-code in RPG.
Doesn't mention the RESET op-code, which I use a lot. Or did - I haven't touched RPG in months, thank God. RESET allows you to customize what the fields in a structure get set to.
Also - Using date data-type fields in RPG-IV and A new and improved find command.
iSeries security pros know it, and the Tories know it.
Rational XDE is a plug-in for IBM's Eclipse based Websphere Studio allowing round-trip visual UML modeling.
It includes pattern wizards, database modeling, J2EE support, and loads of groovy stuff.
Very cool. But $3595! Don't think I'll be getting it...
There is a Visual Studio.NET version too.
A low blow, as they admit, but funny.
Why most men are taller than women.
SuperWaba 3.0 is out.
SuperWaba is a Java Virtual Machine for mobile devices.
MobileCreator 1.3 is an IDE for SuperWaba.
See also Galmast - an interesting looking strategy game for Palm.
Who says these ex-hippies aren't high tech?
Also - He said I made him feel stupid.
Evo looks rather interesting. Not a simple alife toy, (not that there is anything wrong with being a simple alife toy), but a rather sophisticated framework for building complex alife simulations.
iSeries Tools and the Power of X: Why FTP?
I'd not heard of this - using VNC to run iSeries based X Windows sessions. Wild! You can now use EMACS to edit iSeries files.
If Eclipse for the iSeries wasn't around, I'd be looking at using this.
Growing before your very eyes. Scary.
This was Bill Biggart's final photograph. Very moving.
Acno's Energizer and friends.
I'm not sure that War on Terrorisn 2 is in good taste. But Paintball, Flashman and Alien Attack are nice.
I particularly like 'That Shallot'.
The OPAL group have a preliminary version of an ADO module for Python.
The Database Row Module looks interesting, too...
JTOpen is the open source version of IBM's Java toolbox for iSeries. JTOpen--The Right Tools for the Job is a nice introduction.
I am using JTOpen in my current project - mainly the JDBC driver.
Cool 5k web-pages, winners of the 5k competition.
I particulary like Scale Model of the Solar System, Wolfenstein 5K, remote control tank battle, 5kOS and city blossom. The winner, frutiger toy, is cool too.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, the author if the seminal paper Go To Statement Considered Harmful, died yesterday.
Go To Statement Considered Harmful was the opening shot of the structured programming wars.
Edsger W. Dijkstra quotes:
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague" (from 1972 Turing Award Lecture)
"Program testing can best show the presence of errors but never their absence"
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
"If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it."
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
"The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
I am 42% Geek
You probably work in computers, or a history deptartment at a college. You never really fit in with the "normal" crowd. But you have friends, and this is a good thing.
Take the Geek Test at fuali.com
(That isn't my picture, BTW.)
Update 16th August: Another one:
You are 31% geek | |
You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.
Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. |
Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com
I'm at Cruft Force 3 going on 4, but then I have a fairly new PC.
Via iamcal.
Reference Objects and Garbage Collection By Monica Pawlan.
See also O'Reilly on the WeakHashMap class, and an implementation of SoftHashMap, which is missing from the Sun library.
Weak references exist in Python, but unfortunately soft references do not. Which is a shame, 'cos they are very useful for eliminating memory leaks from data caches.
This is every parent's nightmare. It's at times like this that I wish I was a theist, so that I could prey for them.
Does the girl in your life suspiciously win more than her share of your battles?
Metacritic's 200 lowest scores.
Divorce: The Musical? Good God!
Quixote: a Python-Centric Web Application Framework is a nice intro to Quixote.
See also The MEMS Exchange Architecture.
Which Web Server Is the Right One for You? is an interesting discussion of the various web servers which you can run on an iSeries.
IBM claim that Apache/Tomcat doesn't scale as well as WebSphere. Is this true?
Can you run JBoss on a '400?
Hamas' brutal murders last week and this show why it is vital that they are not given a veto over any peace process - they don't want peace. What they want is the destruction of Israel by violent means.
Hamas claim that these murders were in retaliation for Salah Shehadeh's assassination, but no excuse is possible for the deliberate murder of civilians.