Axion is an open source JDBC compliant database in pure Java from Tigris.

Needs a DB-API compliant interface for Jython...

Via James Strachan.

Windows Tray Icon.. Java Implementation!

Via All Things Java.

Some groovy FARK stuff today:

• Ant City
• The Simpsons Archive
• Hats of Meat

Two Minutes with Dave Slater on the iSeries Tools Strategy. The future of the WebSphere Development Studio Client, itself the future of iSeries development tools.

There is a nice new Redbook about this - WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries: Bringing New Life into 5250 Applications. Six meg, but well worth the download.

IBM plays Host to Websphere integration

Sigh. Yet another way of accessing green-screen apps via a browser.

We have gone with Jacada for Java. It's rather heavyweight, but it allows you to customise it almost endlessly by extending the Java that it generates. It's been around for a while, and it's solid. It has to be said though - its interface sucks big time, and it is totally non-automateable, which causes us a huge amount of manual work with our integration builds.

Blondes 'to die out in 200 years', according to the BBC.

Apparently, dyed-blondes are more attractive to men who choose them as partners over true blondes. Then they use Ann Widdecombe as an example of a bottle blonde! Are they taking the piss?

Ah well - I'm more partial to redheads myself, even if they are all psychopaths.

Update 2nd October: Ah. It's a hoax. I really should have guessed that. The BBC is usually so reliable, though...

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible

Just as fascinating - Secular Singles, Personal ads for atheists, agnostics and other freethinkers. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a terrible one, but I'm sure that I feel strongly about it one way or the other.

Via The Ultimate Insult.

• Poke the Bunny
• An illusion
• Be careful when driving into puddles

Mainly via Off on a Tangent.

FixedPoint.py now has its own SourceForge project!

A whole project for one module might seem like a bit much, but it's such an essential module that I think it's a good idea.

There has been some discussion in c.l.py about whether you can use floating point for financial database work. Having 'grow up' with fixed point for this sort of thing, it's a no-brainer so far as I am concerned.

PdfSearch is a full-text PDF file indexer and searcher.

It incorporates Dsave Mertz's indexer.py.

The EffNews Project: Building an RSS Newsreader is now complete.

Everything you need to know to build a simple RSS aggregater.

It would be good to incoporate Mark's ultra-liberal RSS parser into this.

I dunno, somehow Britney asking kids not to download is like telling 15 year old boys not to jerk off to her videos.

Via Erik.

Hold the Button.

Make the fast lane do an overhead loop; the slow pokes would drop off at the top.

JellySwing looks very interesting. It's an XML based GUI generator (Like Thinlets or the Java Gui Builder), but it generates its GUIs at runtime, and supports embedded expressions, custom tags, iteration over SQL and beans.

Via Sanjay.

We are taking no chances in such a sensitive area.

Via FARK.

Kaa is a client based webblogging tool, in pure Python. Looks cool.

I think that I'll stick with Movable Type for the moment, though. It's server based, which I like, though it does add a couple of hurdles in terms of hosting & installation.

I have tried to donate to Movable Type, but PayPal sign-up doesn't work for me - it rejects my password, no matter what I enter. What can I do? I certainly can't be bothered to ring PayPal's helpline! I'd like to donate, but if it's that much hassle, I can't really be bothered.

Via Python Daily URL.

Can't get enough of George W. Bush's speeches?

I, uh, know how you feel. Well, now you can make your own Bush speech.

If you want to match the intelligence of the real thing, then I'd suggest a blindfold.

Via Off on a Tangent.

Charles Miller installed JIRA, an J2EE based issue tracker on an iSeries, and it worked first time. Cool!

I've read Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: The assessment of the British Government, and I find that I agree with David Aaronovitch - this is a case for action, not a case for war.

Vattekkat seems to be unhappy about mention of "some Indian companies". Having read the full dossier, I find mention of only one Indian company. The Indian government suspended this company's export license. You can find unscrupulous companies in any country - God knows there are enough of them here. The Indian government acted entirely properly. Why does Vattekkat think that this reflects badly on India?

Class.forName() is evil...

I guess I'll be looking at a couple of my things again...

J2EE Container Shootout Summary

Don't access the database directly from Servlets and JSP, use EJB intead. EJB caches data for web applications very well and can be ten times faster than ordinary database access.

Via rebelutionary.

Software Engineering for Everyone is an interesting read.

Got this from vsbabu.org.

I would certainly not call myself a software engineer at the moment. I don't think I have ever worked with anyone that I'd call an engineer, either.

I have decided that it's time for a new language, so I'm finally going to give Haskell a go. I've got Simon Thompson's The Craft of Functional Programming. One of the things that I find interesting about functional programming is that is amenable to proof - you can prove a program correct. Whether this is useful in terms of non-trivial development is something I don't know yet, but it will be interesting to find out.

Update: Functional Programming Koans.

I really don't know which category to put these physics applets under.

Science and Technology 'cos they are for science education, Toys 'cos they are fun, or Java 'cos that's what they are written in? Bah, who cares, just enjoy!

Via FARK.

Finally made it in at ten - just an hour late, despite the strike. Not bad!

Thank goodness for the 133! It wasn't so good for everyone, though - I got on at the first stop, but the bus was full after a couple of stops, and stopped picking people up. That's the trick, I think. If at all possible, get on the bus where it starts. The 133 starts Southbound somewhere around Liverpool St., so that's where I'll go on the way home.

And another thing - who said that Britain is a nation of queuers? Wouldn't have taken long to dispel that quaint notion this morning - when a bus draws up, it's everyone for themselves. Despite being at the first stop, and just missing the previous bus, I only just got a seat. I'll just have to learn to be ruder, I suppose.

jsrvany is a Java package (plus a native JNI invoker) which uses the Java event model to implement the win32 Service Control interface in Java. This allows any Java application to be run as a service on Windows NT 4 and for the application to respond to all the events triggered by the win32 Service Control Panel - start, stop, pause, continue, terminate and interrogate.

Guess what - I'm struggling to run a Java application as a service at the moment - this could be just what the doctor ordered.

In fact, running the Java application as a service isn't the problem - stopping the bastard is the trick. And I can't see what is going on, 'cos NT is dropping stdout and stderr on the floor.

StarLogo is a specialized version of the Logo programming language.

I have been interested in Logo for a long time, right back to when I was training as a teacher. God, that was a long time ago.

Anyway, I always thought that Logo was a superb environment for the teaching of programming to children. The primitives give the child excellent feedback (i.e. the turtle moving around), and the introduction of things like procedures, variables and arguments can be introduced very naturally. (If you could get hold of one of the robotic turtles, then that would be fantastic! Or even instructions for making one... I feel a Google coming on.)

StarLogo offers quite a lot to the more advanced user, but does it still offer the nice lead in? I'll have a look. My eldest, Freja, is five now, and she loves maths and computers, so it probably isn't far off time to introduce her to some proper toys. ;-)

Via Sanjay.

Proof - Small Values of Cool is evil.

Google News, for all your news gathering needs. What more is there to say?

I consider myself to be a true liberal. So far as party politics goes, I lean towards the Liberal Democrats (always the party of the future).

Problem is, they are often not actually as liberal as all that. As I have said before, I think that politicians should stay out of peoples lives as much as possible, and not try to make decisions for people where it can be avoided. The Lib-Dems are nearly as bad at this as New Labour - always willing to make laws to force people to behave in what they see as a responsible manner.

It appears that Menzies Campbell (the Lib-Dems' foreign affairs spokesman) agrees with me - We often fail to match our words with deeds, Campbell admits. His philosophy seems to match mine exactly on this issue. Will words turn to action?

Are you a bit anal about clocks which don't show the correct time? I know I am. Atomic Clock Sync will correct your Windows system time every time you boot.

I've been collecting quotations for some time, and I don't really have much to do with them.

I don't have as many as AMK, though.

What I'd really like would be a way of automatically inserting one of these in each posting, but I can't work out how to do that with MT. So, I'll just shove them here...

• Even snakes are afraid of snakes. - Steven Wright
• Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll overfish, cause famine in the next three regions and pollute the atmosphere with his fish.
• I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. - Emo Phillips
• If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. - Isaac Asimov
• Indeed, when I design my killer language, the identifiers 'foo' and 'bar' will be reserved words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference manual. Any program using one will simply dump core without comment. Multitudes will rejoice. - Tim Peters
• Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. - Woody Allen
• Start every day off with a smile and get it over with. - W. C. Fields
• A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it. - Alistair Cooke
• I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to. - Elvis Presley
• If you really want something in life, you have to work for it. Now quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers. - Homer Simpson
• There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs. - Flon's Law
• This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context. - David Moser
• The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw
• Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realise half of them are stupider than that.
• My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats. - Woody Allen
• If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. - Derek Bok
• I want to move to theory. Everything works in theory. - John Cash
• If men acted after marriage as they do during courtship, there would be fewer divorces - and more bankruptcies. - Frances Rodman
• Two things I learned for sure during a particularly intense acid trip in my own lost youth: (1) everything is a trivial special case of something else; and, (2) death is a bunch of blue spheres. - Tim Peters
• With stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. - Friedrich Von Schiller
• He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart. - C. S. Lewis
• Only two things are infinite: The universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein
• What I find most amusing about COM and .NET is that they are trying to solve a problem I only had when programming using MS tools. - Max M
• Greer's Third Law: A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.
• The sooner I get discouraged and quit, the more time I'll save overall. - Frank Sergeant
• It takes two to lie; one to lie and one to listen. - Homer Simpson
• Time Flies like an arrow. Fruit Flies like a banana - Groucho Marx
• Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success. - Tom DeMarco
• Don't feed the lawyers: they just lose their fear of humans. - Peter Wood, comp.lang.lisp
• If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank. - Woody Allen
• If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
• Good, Fast, Cheap. Choose any two.
• Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. - Ernest Hemmingway
• The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought. - Richard Feynman
• We won't allocate much time to testing, because we won't find many bugs. - Steve McConnell, Code Complete
• Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. - Jean-Paul Sartre
• When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction. - Steven Wright
• Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza. - Dave Barry
• Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
• Never use a long word when there's a commensurate diminutive available. - Stan Kelly-Bootle
• There is often a large gap between theory and practice. Furthermore, the gap between theory and practice in practice is much larger than the gap between theory and practice in theory. - Jeff Case
• Win2K - It's not that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped counting at 65,535 to prevent an overflow.
• It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. - Jerome K. Jerome
• I think that it will be a clash between the political will and the administrative won't. - Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, Yes, Prime Minister.
• An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem. - John Tukey
• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. - Voltaire
• The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober - William Butler Yeats
• Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing. - Wernher von Braun
• As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. - Albert Einstein
• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
• The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps. - William Lloyd George
• Less is More. Much more.
• Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
• Most people hate the taste of beer - to begin with. It is, however, a prejudice that many people have been able to overcome - Winston Churchill
• Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. - J.R.R. Tolkien
• The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticient, while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops. - Peter Ustinov
• I have to stop now. I've already told you more than I know. - Wolf Logan
• Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and to remove all doubt. - Mark Twain
• There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. - Joseph Brodsky
• It's like, "How much more black could this be?", and the answer is none. None more black. - Nigel Tufnel
• Don't drink when you drive - you might hit a bump and spill it.
• You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment. - Michael Dobbs, House of Cards
• There is no sleep, there is only caffeine deficiency.
• I've lost my faith in nihilism.
• 'One World, one Web, one Program' - Microsoft promotional ad. 'Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer' - Adolf Hitler.
• A designer knows he has arrived at perfection, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month that I can be myself. - Roseanne
• Rule Number 1 is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule Number 2 is, it's all small stuff. - Robert Eliot
• Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves. - J.R.R. Tolkien
• I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. - Woody Allen
• If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign? - Albert Einstein.
• Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life. - John A. Hrastar
• The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not. - Mark Twain
• It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done. - Erik Naggum
• Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. - Steven Wright
• When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her. - Sacha Guitry
• There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. - C.A.R. Hoare
• Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr
• Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house. - Rod Stewart
• SCSI is not magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then. - John Woods
• The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. - Andrew S. Tanenbaum
• Only wimps use backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on FTP, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;) - Linus Torvalds
• Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
• More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity. - W.A. Wuld
• I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
• Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. - Winston Churchill
• An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question. - John McCarthy
• Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example. - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me. - Emo Philips
• In my experience, the customer doesn't know what he wants until you don't give it to him. - David Brady
• Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honour; which is probably more than she ever did. - Groucho Marx
• When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt. - Henry J. Kaiser
• Even a manager can understand HTML. - Tim Berners-Lee
• The program said "Requires Windows 9x or better", so I installed Linux.
• I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotamy.
• In this house, young lady, we obey the laws of thermodynamics! - Homer Simpson
• Hubris is when you really do have it, enough so only the gods slap you down. Pretentiousness is when you don't have it, and everyone slaps you down. Arrogance is somewhere in between. - Thorfinn
• Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer.
• Women - can't live with them... Pass the beer nuts. - Norm Peterson (Cheers)
• What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. - Dave Barry
• Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? - Groucho Marx
• With Microsoft, failure is not an option. It comes bundled.
• Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships. - Sharon Stone
• Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. - Mark Twain
• You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are. - Colonel Adolphus Busch
• In short, just business as usual in the wacky world of floating point . - Tim Peters
• Inform all the troops that communications have completely broken down. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• War is God's way of teaching Americans geography. - Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
• To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it? - Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, Blackadder
• A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five. - Groucho Marx
• As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
• Microsoft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate!!
• You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time. - Bertrand Meyer, 1989
• Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission and I want to help you. - Hal 9000
• You stupid, ungrammatical, pathetic... Sorry? Oh, you wanted an argument. This is Abuse. Argument is two doors down.
• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. - Richard Feynman
• Translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive. - Roy Campbell
• I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception. - Groucho Marx
• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. - Steven Wright
• I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. - Stephen Leacock
• Not all who wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien
• If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it. - Maurice Baring
• Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions'. Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawinski, comp.lang.emacs
• I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. - HAL 9000
• What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? - Ursula K. LeGuin
• Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them. - Sam Goldwyn
• Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent - Isaac Asimov
• Python is executable pseudocode. Perl is executable line noise. - Bruce Eckel
• Nothing simple is ever easy. - Jim Becker
• Bill Gates is just a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being one of the bad guys in a James Bond movie. - Dennis Miller
• There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering. - Robert A. Heinlein
• I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
• If Windows is the solution, can we please have the problem back?
• It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. - Abraham Lincoln
• There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes. - Bertrand Russell
• I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying. - Woody Allen
• We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. - Robert Wilensky
• Disclaimer: I'm not as smart as I think I am.
• Perl - the only programming language that looks the same both before and after RSA encryption.
• Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday.
• There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. - Alan J. Perlis
• Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs? - from The Goon Show
• Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. - Aldous Huxley
• Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. - Susan Ertz
• Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision. - Blake Clark
• Never mistake motion for action. - Ernest Hemingway
• Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein. - Joe Theisman, Former quarterback
• Too little freedom makes life confusingly clumsy; too much, clumsily confusing. Luckily, the tension between freedom and restraint eventually gets severed by Guido's Razor. - Tim Peters
• As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. - Dick Cavett
• You shouldn't anthropomorphize computers; they don't like it.
• McNaughton's Rule: Any argument worth making within a bureaucracy must be capable of being expressed in a simple declarative sentence that is obviously true once stated.
• I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book. - Groucho Marx
• Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties. - Doug Larson
• Brigands require your money or your life, whereas women require both. - Samuel Butler
• There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven. - Dave Barry
• I've seen Python criticized as "ugly" precisely because it doesn't have a trick-based view of the world. In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts from many other languages & styles: boring syntax, unsurprising semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc. But that's one of the things I like about it. - Tim Peters
• The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. - Bill Watterson
• The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code - not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death. - Guido van Rossum
• If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girl's sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such... - Homer Simpson
• Going to bed with a woman never hurt a ballplayer. It's staying up all night looking for them that does you in. - Casey Stengel
• A committee is a group of men who individually can do nothing, but collectively can meet and decide that nothing can be done.
• 'Complexity' seems to be a lot like 'energy': you can transfer it from the end user to one/some of the other players, but the total amount seems to remain pretty much constant for a given task. - Ran
• I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
• Women are like elephants. I like to look at 'em, but I wouldn't want to own one. - W.C. Fields
• You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try. - Homer Simpson
• In C, we had to code our own bugs. In C++ we can inherit them.
• If you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. - Homer Simpson
• It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up. - W. Somerset Maugham
• The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad. - Salvador Dali
• Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? - Charlie McCarthy
• It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. - Andrew Jackson
• I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me. - Duke of Wellington
• I feel sorry for people who don't drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that's the best they're going to feel all day. - Frank Sinatra
• A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. - Dave Barry
• I have assuredly found an admirable resolution to this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it. - Pierre de Fermat
• One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I'll never know.- Groucho Marx
• Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. - George Bernard Shaw
• I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury. - George Burns
• There is nothing that is impossible to the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
• It is possible that blondes also prefer gentlemen. - Maimie Van Doren
• Isn't vi that text editor with two modes... one that beeps and one that corrupts your file? - Dan Jocabson
• I just want to go on the record as being completely opposed to computer languages. Let them have their own language and soon they'll be off in the corner plotting with each other! - Steven D. Majewski
• If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git'. - Alexei Sayle
• There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it. - Mary Little
• Programmers are achievement oriented; give them an impossible task, and they'll do their best to give you what they think you would have asked for if you had a clue as to what was possible. - Peter Coffee
• Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something. - Kent Beck
• Emotions are alien to me. I'm a scientist. - Spock, 'This Side of Paradise', stardate 3417.3
• Computers are like horses; they can sense fear and will act based on that. - Adam Engst
• The palest ink is better than the best memory. - Chinese proverb
• There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
• Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. - Eric S. Raymond, 'Why Python'
• I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. - Steven Wright
• Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and all is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and all is organized by the Italians. - Vic Pecka & Paige Scott
• My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• It's never too late to have a happy childhood. - Anthony Baxter
• I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. - Art Buchwald
• If you never change your mind, why have one? - Edward De Bono
• It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. - Commodore Hopper, inventor of COBOL
• Who does not love wine, women, and song, Remains a fool his whole life long. - Johann Heinrich Voss
• You can't have everything. Where would you put it? - Steven Wright
• As a wise programmer once said, 'Floating point numbers are like sandpiles: every time you move one, you lose a little sand and you pick up a little dirt'. And after a few computations, things can get pretty dirty. - Kernighan and Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style
• Lowery's Law: If it jams - force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
• The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind. - Humphrey Bogart
• I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake - which I also keep handy. - W. C. Fields
• There are two kinds of fools, one that says 'This is old, and therefore good'. And one that says 'This is new, and therefore better' - John Brunner
• The opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. In fact, they're probably not even my own. You know what, just don't even bother reading it.
• If you're not making waves, you're not under weigh. - Admiral Nimitz
• Americans always do the right thing, once they have exhausted all other possibilities. - Winston Churchill
• Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home wine making course and I forgot how to drive? - Homer Simpson
• Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. - Groucho Marx
• This contract is so one-sided that I am surprised to find it written on both sides of the paper. - Lord Evershead
• Error: No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue. - Actual MS Windows error message
• The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know they are dogmas. - G.K. Chesterton
• I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. - Woody Allen
• Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow. - Franklin K. Dane
• I sense much distrust in you. Distrust leads to cynicism, cynicism leads to bitterness, bitterness leads to the Awareness Of True Reality which is referred to by those-who-lack-enlightenment as "paranoia". I approve. - David P. Murphy, alt.sysadmin.recovery
• Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. - George Gordon Noel (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)
• I always pass on good advice. It's the only thing to do with it. It is never any use to oneself. - Oscar Wilde
• All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
• A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. - Mitch Ratcliffe
• Slashdot, with its uncontrolled content and participants' poor impulse control, remains Internet culture's answer to 'Lord of the Flies.' - Salon
• When others kid me about being bald, I simply tell them that the way I figure it, the good Lord only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on growing hair, that's up to them. - Senator John Glenn
• If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
• Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
• The English public take no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is obscene. - Oscar Wilde
• Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good. - Samuel Johnson
• If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. - Norm Schryer
• I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called 'brightness', but it doesn't seem to work. - Gallagher
• It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them. - La Rochefoucauld
• Man must shape his tools lest they shape him. - Arthur Miller
• My wife has cut our lovemaking down to once a month, but I know two guys she's cut out entirely. - Rodney Dangerfield
• Give a pedant an inch and they'll take 25.4mm (once they've established you're talking a post-1959 inch, of course).
• A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. - H. L. Mencken
• Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. - Franklin P. Jones
• Remember - a dog is not just for Christmas. You can make sandwiches & curries in the new year.
• I resent your implication that Americans are insensitive to the culture of the unwashed, ignorant heathens that populate the rest of the world. - Shawn Wilson
• Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer - Henry Lawson
• If a job's worth doing, somebody else will probably do it.
• Travel, of course, narrows the mind. - Malcolm Muggeridge
• Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein
• Ahh, Beer! My one weakness... My Achilles Heel, if you will. - Homer Simpson
• Never meddle in the affairs of NT. It is slow to boot and quick to crash. - Stephen Harris
• It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code. - Bill Harlan
• Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. - Bernard Berenson
• I'd rather have two girls at 21 each than one girl at 42. - W.C. Fields
• I can't see the point in the theatre. All that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home. Apart from the sex, of course. - Baldrick, in Blackadder III
• Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. - G.K. Chesterton
• I want to share something with you - the three sentences that will get you through life. Number one, 'cover for me'. Number two, 'oh, good idea, boss'. Number three, 'it was like that when I got here'. - Homer Simpson
• I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going down to the planet - Avon, Blake's Seven
• C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
• If a job is not worth doing, it is not worth doing well.
• A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
• There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. - Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++
• We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. - Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz, Programming Perl
• You kids today, with your piercings and your big pants and your purple-and-green hair and your X-Files and your Paula Cole and your espresso coffee and your Seattle grunge rock and your virtual machines and your acid-washed jeans and your Ernest Hemingway and your object-oriented languages and your fax machines and your hula hoops and your zoot suits and your strange slang phrases like 'That's so bogus' or 'What a shocking bad hat' and those atonal composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbit that you kids seem to like these days and your cubist painters and your Ally McBeal and that guy in Titanic and your TCP/IP protocol and your heads filled with all that Cartesian dualism these days and ... well, I just don't get you kids. - A.M. Kuchling
• I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers. - Emo Phillips
• If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Every time we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it himself. - Jean Piaget
• Gui-do: the way of the Python. - Bernhard Herzog
• This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. - Winston Churchill
• When choosing between two evils, I always try to choose the one I haven't tried before. - Mae West
• Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer - Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Ask Mr. Language Person: Q. Please explain how to diagram a sentence. A. First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. For example, in the sentence: "LaMont never would of bit a forest ranger," the action probably took place in a forest. Thus your diagram would be shaped like a little tree with branches sticking out of it to indicate the locations of the various particles of speech, such as your gerunds, proverbs, adjutants, etc. - Dave Barry
• Every woman needs one man in her life who is strong and responsible. Given this security, she can proceed to do what she really wants to do - fall in love with men who are weak and irresponsible. - Richard J. Needham
• Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: Every non-trivial program contains at least one bug.
• I'm not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls. - Senator George Aiken
• Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place. - Billy Crystal
• If you can't explain something to a six-year-old child, you really don't understand it yourself. - Albert Einstein
• As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. - M. Cartmill
• GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions. - Doug Gwyn
• The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. - Nathaniel Borenstein
• I would rather suffer defeat than have cause to be ashamed of victory. - Quintus Curtius
• Why is it that all battles are fought in the middle of the night, in downpouring rain, and at the corners of four different maps? - George Patton
• Whenever copyright law is to be made or altered, then all the idiots assemble. - Mark Twain
• Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. - Robert Benchley
• Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes. - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Linux - the Ultimate Windows Service Pack
• Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. - Thomas A. Edison
• I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves. - August Strindberg
• Cargill's Law: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. - Tom Cargill, Bell Labs.
• What is a wedding? Webster's Dictionary defines a wedding as 'The process of removing weeds from one's garden.' - Homer Simpson (giving a lecture on marriage)
• Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. - Tiger Woods
• All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable - Fran Lebowitz
• An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. - John Buchan
• A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions that make it fail. - Jerry Ogdin
• There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by philosophers. - Cicero
• Ah, yes, "divorce". From the Latin for "having your genitals torn off through your wallet". - Robin Williams
• Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. - Niels Bohr
• Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
• The only 'intuitive' user interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. - Bruce Ediger
• Python - why settle for snake oil when you can have the whole snake? - Mark Jackson
• All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears - of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required." - Dave Barry
• A logician trying to explain logic to a programmer is like a cat trying to explain to a fish what it's like to get wet.
• If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing. - Bertrand Russell
• To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or a wild animal. - P. J. O'Rourke
• Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse. - Larry Wall
• Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.- Nietzsche
• In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is. - Chuck Reid
• Plan to throw one away. You will anyway. - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr, 'The Mythical Man Month'
• The function of an expert is not to be more right than other people, but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons. - David Butler
• Never put off until tomorrow what you can get out of doing entirely.
• Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. - Dave Barry
• Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue. - J.K. Galbraith
• My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking. - Marshal Foch
• Life's better without braces. - Bruce Eckel
• Curiosity is the very basis of education, and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. - Arnold Edinborough
• A pseudointellectual is a person who knows what "pseudo" means.
• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. - Bertrand Russell
• Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them. - Lou Holtz
• First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack. - George Carrette
• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald E. Knuth
• All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. - IBM maintenance manual, 1925
• I had lots of reasonable theories about children myself, until I had some. - Michael Rios
• For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H L Mencken
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• About the only people who don't quarrel over religion are the people who don't have any. - Bob Edwards
• I am not young enough to know everything. - James Matthew Sarrie
• Trying is the first step towards failure. - Homer Simpson
• If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend 6 sharpening my ax. - Abraham Lincoln
• A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. - Sir Barnett Cocks
• More damage has been caused by innocent program crashes than by malicious viruses, but they don't make great stories. - Jean-Louis Gassee
• Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. - Noam Chomsky
• It seems that there are two equal and opposite mistakes one can make about Star Trek. One is to find in it a worthy ideology - the other to find in it an ideology worthy of refutation. - Michael V. Voytinsky
• When you think for yourself, you get to solve the problems that you create for yourself, too. - Tim Peters
• It would be difficult to construe this as a feature. - Larry Wall
• 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? - Stephen Wright
• If you are angry with someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes... Then you'll be a mile away from them, and you'll have their shoes.
• If not controlled, work will flow to the competent man until he submerges. - Charles Boyle
• A bug is just a unit test that hasn't been written yet. - Mark Pilgrim
• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. - Thomas Edison
• Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
• It is better to go into a corner slow and come out fast, than to go in fast and come out dead. - Stirling Moss
• Everything should be as simpler as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstien
• Some little people have music in them, but Fats, he was all music, and you know how big he was. - James P. Johnson
• A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime. - Steve McConnell
• Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family. - O. C. Ogilvie
• It is not true that nice guys finish last. Nice guys are winners before the game even starts. - Addison Walker
• If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. - Lyall Watson
• My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself. - Emo Philips
• One treats others with courtesy not because they are a gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are. - G. Henrichs
• Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. - Pablo Picasso
• The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
• When you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose: it's how drunk you get. - Homer Simpson
• Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. :-) - Larry Wall
• It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. - Dr. W. Edwards Deming
• Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am... - Bob Dylan
• He uses statistics the way a drunken man uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination. - Andrew Lang
• The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up. - Steven Wright
• How many six year olds does it take to design software? - Microsoft Ad.
• There are times when effort is important and necessary, but this should not be taken as any kind of moral imperative. - J Decker
• Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory. - Warren Buffet
• It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed. - Goethe
• That's your plan? Wile E. Coyote would come up with a better plan than that! - John Crichton
• I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• If you moderate me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
• Statistics are a little bit like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Irving R. Levine
• I was playing poker the other night, with Tarot cards. I got a full house and 4 people died. - Steven Wright
• Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. - Dave Barry
• That happy sense of purpose people have when standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet.- P. J. O'Rourke
• A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. - W.C. Fields
• Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time. - Frederick P. Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month
• Here's a good rule of thumb: Too clever is dumb. - Ogden Nash
• Every coding standard has a valid exception. - Bruce Sanders
• Python - the most powerful language you can still read. - Paul Dubois
• Statistical analysis shows that the junk looks like human text, which clearly shows that it is actually used in some yet unknown way. (docstrings?) - Fredrik Lundh, writing about junk DNA
• We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - Donald Knuth
• I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad soldiers; we will settle the matter by lunch time. - Napoleon Bonaparte
• The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but let's not overlook fear. - Jim Perry
• The Enron scandal calls into question the integrity of the entire capitalist system, which previously we assumed was based on honest, straightforward greed. - Joel Achenbach
• You might think "That's illegal." That's not illegal; that's cool. - Paul Dubois, on recursive template definitions in C++
• Fixing unused code is a waste of time; I won't do it anymore, but I will devote time to getting rid of unused code. - Tim Peters
• I know nothing about this subject, but I do have prejudices, which I am more than happy to share with you. - Leon Botstein
• The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank. - Scotty
• I'll not listen to reason. Reason always means what someone else has to say. - Elizabeth Gaskell
• I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day, 'cause that means it's going to be up all night. - Steven Wright
• Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind - Samuel Johnson
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. - Chris Mattern
• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. - Bertrand Russell
• Ninety percent of baseball is half mental. - Yogi Berra
• I'm already not yet convinced. - Larry Wall
• There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness". - Dave Barry
• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. - Fred Brooks
• My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. - Errol Flynn
• The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. - Oscar Wilde
• Reality is what refuses to disappear when you stop believing in it - Philip K. Dick
• Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) - Alphonse Karr
• A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion - Miguel de Cervantes
• The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. - Bertrand Russell
• Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
• Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it - Richard Feynman
• Two major products came from Berkeley; LSD and UNIX. This is no coincidence.
• What's the earliest date by which you can't prove you won't be finished? - Tom West, Eagle Project, Data General
• For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. - Alice Kahn
• About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. - E. W. Dijkstra, 18th June 1975. Perl did not exist at the time.
• Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't. - Sir Arthur Eddington
• When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will shoot their children accidentally.
• I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. - Winston Churchill
• I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it. - Groucho Marx
• If Windows is the answer, it must have been a stupid question.
• Work is the curse of the drinking classes. - Oscar Wilde
• Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad. - Frederik Pohl
• I respect the truth too much to drag it out on every occasion. - Jerome K. Jerome
• I don't say that I don't believe in God because that implies that there is a God for me not to believe in. - Douglas Adams
• In order to keep an open mind, I am trying to avoid learning anything. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
• We had better get coding straight away, because we are going to have lots of debugging to do. - Steve McConnell, Code Complete
• I drink to make other people interesting. - George Jean Nathan
• There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over. - Meskimen's Law
• If you can't make it good, make it look good. - Bill Gates, 1995
• It's hard to drive at the limit, but it's harder to know where the limits are. - Stirling Moss
• Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I'll have a witty and blistering retort! You'll be devastated THEN! - Calvin
• Nobody ever promised me life would be easy... but, then again, nobody ever warned me it might be impossible. - Jake Vest
• We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. - Plato
• Pretend that your reader is lazy, stupid, and mean. He's lazy in that he doesn't want to figure out what your convoluted sentences are supposed to mean, and he doesn't want to figure out what your argument is, if it's not already obvious. He's stupid, so you have to explain everything you say to him in simple, bite-sized pieces. And he's mean, so he's not going to read your paper charitably. (For example, if something you say admits of more than one interpretation, he's going to assume you meant the less plausible thing.) - James Pryor, Harvard philosophy professor, on writing.
• By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. - Socrates
• I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering. - Steven Wright
• Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered. - Guido van Rossum
• Woody: "Hey, Mr Peterson, there's a cold one waiting for you." Norm: "I know, and if she calls, I'm not here."
• You can't be real a country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. - Frank Zappa
• It's such a fine line between stupid and clever. - David St. Hubbins
• If it works, leave it alone -- there's no need to understand it. If it fails, try to fix it -- there's no time to understand it. - Bill Pfeifer
• It's only too slow if it's too slow.
• The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. - Steven Weinberg
• Death has come to our windows. - Jeremiah 9:21
• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
• If God intended man to be vegetarians, he wouldn't have made animals out of meat. - Bill Handel
• In case you're not a computer person, I should probably point out that 'Real Soon Now' is a technical term meaning 'sometime before the heat-death of the universe, maybe'. - Scott Fahlman
• It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. - Jerome K. Jerome
• Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! - Homer Simpson
• To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid; you must also be well-mannered. - Voltaire
• Of the four project development variables - scope, cost, time and quality - quality isn't really a free variable. The only possible values are 'excellent' and 'insanely excellent', depending on whether lives are at stake. Otherwise you don't enjoy your work, you don't work well, and the project goes down the drain. - Kent Beck, XP Explained
• I always wanted to be somebody. I see now that I should have been more specific. - Lily Tomlin
• I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time. - Steven Wright
• You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything. - Donald E. Knuth
• Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage. - Dr. Karl Bowman
• Any system that depends on reliability is unreliable. - Nogg's Postulate
• No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. - Aesop
• If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. - Steven Wright
• A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire
• All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• I wouldn't recommend alcohol and drugs to anyone. But they have always worked for me. - Hunter S. Thompson
• Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer - Dave Barry
• I don't use drugs. My dreams are frightening enough. - M.C. Escher
• Belief is no substitute for arithmetic. - Henry Spencer
• Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well. - Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)
• In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. And in Switzerland they had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. - Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the 'Third Man'
• It's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble; it's the things we do know that ain't so. - Will Rogers
• Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion. - Francis Bacon
• I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. - Groucho Marx
• Everything has got a moral, if only you can find it. - Lewis Carroll
• Men say of women what pleases them; women do with men what pleases them. - DeSegur
• Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning. - Robert Cringley
• If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry. - Anton Chekhov
• The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and doesn't stop until you get to work. - Steven Wright
• I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short. - Blaise Pascal
• You got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there. - Yogi Berra
• If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance - John Andrew Holmes
• No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it. - C. Schulz
• A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke. - Groucho Marx
• The divorce was mostly my fault - I tended to place my wife under a pedestal. - Woody Allen
• I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. - Poul Anderson
• All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. - Alexander Woollcott
• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. - Oscar Wilde
• Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
• The command line *is* the front line.
• You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. - Naguib Mahfouz
• There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians. - Georges Pompido
• Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat. - Oscar Wilde
• This one goes to eleven. - Nigel Tufnel
• Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion. - Harlan Ellison
• That's how you know you're hooked on something; when it makes you forget to drink beer. - Paul Mather
• When Henry Kissinger can get the Nobel Peace Prize, what is there left for satire? - Tom Lehrer
• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' - Isaac Asimov
• Jargon: Jargon consists of words, phrases and syntactic usages which make communication easier between insiders in any field of study while making it harder for outsiders, thereby linguistically enforcing the elitism of expertise. Unless you use jargon liberally your career is likely to stagnate, especially in the computer industry. - Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning
• Shipping software is an unnatural act. - David Stafford
• I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me. - Dave Barry
• Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand. - Homer Simpson
• To alcohol! The cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems! - Homer Simpson
• When someone tells you something defies description, you can be pretty sure he's going to have a go at it anyway. - Clyde B. Aster
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Oscar Wilde
• Reporter: 'What do you think of Western Civilisation?' M.K. Gandhi: 'I think it would be a good idea.'
• This is Python. We don't care much about theory, except where it intersects with useful practice. - Aahz Maruch
• Lost interest? It's so bad I've lost apathy.
• By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. - Charles Wadsworth
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up. - Salvador Dali
• We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. - James D. Nicoll
• A couple of months in the laboratory can save a couple of hours in the library. - Frank H. Westheimer
• My girlfriend always laughs during sex - no matter what she's reading. - Steve Jobs
• When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - Richard Buckminster Fuller
• All generalizations are dangerous, even this one. - Alexandre Dumas
• To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and whatever you hit, call it the target. - Ashleigh Brilliant
• I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart. - Jerome K. Jerome
• If you think *I'm* expensive, wait until you hire an amateur.
• I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest. - Alexandre Dumas
• Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are quick to anger and have not need for subtlety.
• An efficient organization is one in which the accounting department knows the exact cost of every useless administrative procedure which they themselves have initiated. - E.W.R. Steacie
• I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my desk. - Robert Bloch
• Q: How many RPG programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Change? CHANGE?
• I think... I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check. - M.C. Escher
• When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When the hammer you have is C++, everything looks like a thumb.
• An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools. - For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway
• To my battle-scarred mind, documentation is never more than a hint. Read it once with disbelief suspended, and then again with full throttle skepticism. - Gordon McMillan
• On two occasions I have been asked (by members of Parliament!), 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
• FRANKLIN: have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? HEADMASTER: Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards. Alan Bennett, Forty years on (1969), act 2.
• It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. - James Thurber
• No Mr. Bond! I expect you to die! - Auric Goldfinger

I passed this quote around the office, and everyone said "Yeah, Simon, that's you".

Miffy - the Vampire Slayer. Superb wallpaper!

Via B3taPaper.

Vattekkat's News Aggregator is pretty groovy.

I'll steal it, when I have the time.

Currently, I'm using feedreader, but I'm not that fond of it. Nothing wrong with it, as such - I just don't feel affection for it.

In addition to the changes that Vattekkat plans to make, it would be nice to externalize the list of sites to read, and to provide a mechanism for maintaining the list. Hey, this is open source - he has to leave something for the rest of us to do!

Dynamic Proxies in Java

We make heavy use of proxies in my current project, and it involves a lot of boilerplate.

I knew how to avoid boilerplate in Python, but not in Java. This is worth investigating...

Marc-André's been hard at work - new versions of the essential mxBase (including mxDateTime) and mxCommercial (i.e. mxODBC) have been released.

I've been looking at the stuff from Sysinternals a bit more - very cool stuff!

Windows utilities - I particularly like BgInfo, DiskMon and (best of all) Bluescreen.

Update: Also bloody handy - Regmon and TCPView. You won't use these two often, but when you need them, you need them bad.

This Sunday, between 300,000 and 400,000 people (0.4% of the UK's population, approximately) came to London to protest against the government's handling of rural affairs. There seem to have been two main threads to the reasoning behind the protest.

Liberty. The government is planning to make fox-hunting illegal. The House of Commons has already voted this through twice, on both occasions allowing a free vote. On both occasions, the (unelected) House of Lords blocked the legislation. Assuming that a third vote goes against fox-hunting, the government is likely to use the Parliament Act to force the legislation through.

I have some sympathy with those who don't want fox-hunting banned. Not much, but some. I strongly disapprove of fox-hunting. I think that to hunt and kill an animal in a painful manner for pleasure is morally wrong. But, it is for the individual to decide on their own actions, and the government should stay out of it wherever possible. I think that the government should resist any impulse to legislate on matters of conscience.

Having said that, the ban on fox-hunting was in the government's manifesto, and the government won the election, so I suppose that they are entitled to legislate...

Livelihood. The farming industry in this country is becoming untenable. Subsidies are heavy already, and are very unlikely to increase, but farmers claim that is almost impossible to make a living.

Hmmm. Again, some sympathy here - no one likes to find out that their way of life has no future. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is. The farmers are, Canute like, fighting the tide of history, and they are bound to lose. The government couldn't change this if they wanted to. It seems that British farming as a means of mass food production is finished.

It must be said, this is not the first time that an industry has disappeared (or at least altered beyond all recognition). I can't say that I remember the farmers giving the miners much support ten years ago! Should the State keep obsolete industries alive? Can it? I think not.

If my skills go out of date, should the State support me? No, of course not. It is my responsibility to keep myself up to date and employable, and the same goes for the farmers. I suspect that farming can have a future in the UK, but as a producer of high quality produce for those willing to pay, not as a mass food producer. A smaller industry, certainly, but perhaps a sustainable one.

Personal observations - getting around London was a nightmare yesterday. The visitors have no idea as to tube-etiquette - pushing onto trains without letting people off first, mulling in large groups blocking interconnections, that sort of thing. One tweed-clad chap nearly crushed my little girl. I had to give him a firm shove to make some room for her.

Also, other than the tube, using public transport clearly didn't occur to people. The roads were chock-full of coaches, and I have never seen so many range-rovers parked throughout London's streets. I shudder to think how much CO2 was released! The train to Reading was nice and empty, though, as was the Science Museum!

The Science Museum is the best kid's day out in London by far, by the way. The girls and I go once a month at least - they pretty much demand it.

Update: Our Country Cousins & Damn those countryside people.

On IBM's iSeries and OS/400 roadmaps

Resin: The Instant Application Server

I have downloaded Resin, as a response to worries about Tomcat, but I haven't had a chance to play with it just yet - Tomcat hasn't caused us any problems yet!

The Python Web services developer: XML-RPC for Python

Examples, with narrative, of XML-RPC clients and servers. Nice and simple - it seems like XML-RPC and Python are good partners!

Via Babu.

A new, Unicode friendly release of wxPython is out.

wxPython is the force behind Boa Constructor and PythonCard, and seems to be the most popular GUI toolkit for Python at the moment. It might even achieve critical mass some day.

Don't know wxPython? Documentation for beginners used to be scarce, but it's coming on stream now - see IBM's tutorial, and the wxPython site's own tutorial.

Java layout managers are a total pig - I can't tell you the hours I've wasted fiddling, trying to get my GUIs to look just right.

Of course, things might have gone more smoothly if I knew what I was doing. ;-)

In the end, I ended up writing my own layout manager. But I don't think that I'd have had to had this been available at the time - RelativeLayout, a Constraint-Based Layout Manager.

The first four chapters of David Mertz's Text Processing in Python are online.

Fascinating stuff - I shall certainly be picking this up when it comes out - whenever that might be.

Only today, I was asked for a good RE tutorial, and I was able to recommend chapter 3.

I'm working through Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Ed at the moment. It's making my head hurt, but I'm learning a lot.

The "What Sucks" Index - PHP comes out well, with Python coming in second. VB sucks big-time, C++ sucks bigger-time, and Perl and Java suck a bit.

All very scientific, I'm sure. ;-)

Via c.l.py.

Taliban Reunited is the simple way to find out what your old terrorist chums and captives are doing now.

Miles Nordin is obviously having a really bad time with Java - he's totally pissed off with it, by the sound of it. Still, Java, Language of Tomorrow debunks a lot of hype.

I can't say that I love Java - it's not Python. But we rub along together well enough.

Via Babu.

Vattekkat's 'buzzword compliance' point is certainly a good one. Better than just asking about the technologies, interviewers should ask about techniques - "What does "Model-View-Controller' mean to you?", "What are tag libraries good for - how can they improve the quality, and particularly maintainability, of your code". That sort of thing.

The End of Inheritance: Automatic Run-time Interface Building for Aggregated Objects is a fascinating new recipe on the Python Cookbook.

Knowing both Python and Java has made me think about the relationship between types, interfaces, inheritance and classes a lot more than knowing just one would have done, I think. It certainly seems to me that the central concept is the interface - what roles can the object take. This is quite a separate thing from inheritance - that's about behavior, what an object actually is.

A good example here is the Python concept of a 'file'. Any object which follows the file 'protocol' (or the required subset of that protocol which is actually used) can be used anywhere that a real file object can. You could do this in Java quite easily, by implementing 'file' using an interface, but people usually seem to use inheritance instead.

This recipe allows you to build a class composed of other objects (with a 'has-a' relationship), but to automatically implement the behaviors of the contained objects.

You can do something similar with Java's Dynamic Proxy Class API, as as Java 1.3.

Via the Python Daily URL.

Seven tricks that Web users don't know

An excelent set of tips for developing web sites for non-technical people. It's important for techies to bear this sort of thing in mind.

Via from the orient.

8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter

Via FARK.

Bush launches "Operation Shut Your Piehole" Against European Leaders

Via FARK.

They are threatening to make me use learn and use VB at work! Arrrrrgh! Arrrrrgh!

ADO is Micro$oft's strategic database interface.

It isn't going away, and if you are a Windows victim user, it's a good way of getting at data. There are two ways to get at it using Python - either directly via COM, or via OPAL's Python DB-API 2.0 driver. The first way is more flexible, the second is code compatible with other DB-API 2.0 drivers. Take your pick!

Psyco is a Python compiler. Looks ike black magic to me - large speed improvements no work required!

Feedback is overwhelmingly positive.

If I had any performance issues with any of my Python stuff, I'd try this like a shot. But I don't.

SQuirreL SQL - SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical Java program that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc.

Looks really cool.

Via Sanjay's Journal of Coding Tips, via Babu.

Easily maintain SQL triggers is a nice example of the kind of thing that you can do with SQL on the '400 these days.

'Smart' databases might seem like an unalloyed good thing, but I'm not so sure anymore. Do you really want your business rules mixed up with your database?

Sure, triggers mean that you can't break the rules even when editing data with SQL, DFU, or the wonderful WRKDBF, but the temptation would be to put too much intelligence into the trigger.

You want your business rules to live in your business objects. These are the things it which you code all your business rules - usually in the form of OO classes, but you can use an RPG service program or suchlike to take the same role. Your triggers should be thin wrappers, simply calling out to the business objects for verification of the required data change, and for any consequential database operations. The database should be just a repository for your data.

Of course, your front end (be it a GUI, a web service, or whatever) should also be as thin as possible, and hook into your business objects.

And thus a 3-tier architecture is born!

Blunkett sparks language row

Now, encouraging immigrants to learn to speak English sounds like a good thing - I feel that different cultures can only really happily live next to one another if they can communicate. Making English language lessions mandatory appears a bit reactionary at first, but there are arguments that it can enable people to make choices that otherwise they might not be able to - certain cultures would not encourage women to learn English and to engage in life outside the home, for example. Now if a woman chooses such a life, then that is up to her, but giving her the tools she need to make her own decision can only be a good thing, and in the UK, a command of English is one of them.

But surely what language people choose to speak in their own homes is a matter for them?

Looks like Jan Hendrik Schön was cooking the books. Expensive fallout, both in money and careers.

Via Techdirt.

It's official - I'm on the committee.

As I have said before, I don't tend to like committees, but it's a nice bunch of people that I'll be working with, so it might even end up being fun!

One recipe which didn't make it into the Python Cookbook is Simple JSP Custom Tag in Jython.

How to Create Custom JSP Tags is a good intro to custom tags. Nicer in Jython, though!

Another good Jython for J2EE recipe, A simple Jython servlet did make the cut.

M$'s Software Choice page, and Bruce Perens' Sincere Choice.

Via Pushing the envelope.

AutoIt. AutoIt is a simple tool that can simulate key presses, mouse movements and window commands (maximize, minimize, wait for, etc.) in order to automate any windows based task (or even windowed DOS tasks).

What is cool about this is that it's available as an ActiveX control, and is therefore Python scriptable using win32com.

The First Smiley :-)

It's the 20th anniversary if the first smiley next Thursday.

International Smiley Day. I like it.

Via The Register.

Microsoft dumps Office subscription trial

Via Techdirt.

Python MQI Interface.

MQSeries is pertty big in the iSeries world, so I'll hang onto this link for future reference.

IBM Lightweight Services. IBM Lightweight Services (LWS) is a J2EE (JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application that provides an event-driven hosting environment for lightweight services. Lightweight services are persistent, transactional, server-side programs developed in lightweight programming languages such as JavaScript and Python.

Via Erik's Weblog.

The Java Gui Builder auto generates Java GUIs based on XML.

I'll definitely give this a bash next time I have to build a GUI - doing it by hand is a total pain, especially if you are a bit of a perfectionist. (I ended up writing my own layout manager - that's how much of a perfectionist I am!)

If the example is anything to go by, this it should be pretty simple. I wonder if it supports AWT?

Via Cafe au Lait.

Mike Cannon-Brookes' Is Tomcat Crap?, and the follow up Bashing the Cat are worth a look it you are a Tomcat user.

We are currently deploying to Tomcat, and we don't seem to be having a problem. But then, we haven't rolled out to any of our larger clients yet, so time will tell...

I'm not too concerned, because the problem seems mainly to be with Jasper, Tomcat's JSP component. Since we are using Tomcat mainly as a servlet container, this won't effect us. Besides, Tomcat 4.21 is out, with a totally new version of Jasper, so the problem may have been solved.

We are also using Tomcat to serve static content, and I think that we might need to look at this - an Apache/Tomcat combination might perform better here, and give us more fine grained control over caching.

Still, I'll keep Resin and Orion in mind if we have any scalability problems.

See also Using Tomcat in Production.

There seem to be a fair number of people blogging on the subjects of Java, J2EE and/or Eclipse.

Many of them can be found via Mike Cannon-Brookes' java.blogs page. Mike's weblog, rebelutionary, is worth a read. I'll touch on some of his writing elsewhere...

See also:

• Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog
• Niel Eyde's Weblog
• Russell Beattie Notebook
• Erik's Weblog
• javanicus
• Sam Ruby
• All Things Java
• Cafe au Lait

A disproportionate number if these are Radio weblogs. I wonder why?

Also well worth reading for J2EE news - The Server Side.

Update 13th September: Pushing the envelope is another interesting Java related blog.

BEA WebLogic JRockit 7.0 is a high-performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

It's a specialised server-side JVM, providing a management console. It features advanced garbage collection options and lighweight threads. It's free as in beer, but not as in speech.

Might well be worth a look.

Crossbar is an open source server-side reporting framework.

It can pull data from any JDBC accessible database. Ad-hoc queries, simple SQL based reports and more complex model-based reports are all handled by the same presentation layer.

Also, I came across iText, another Java based PDF generator - another is PJ Classic. I'll compare these if and when I need to generate PDF.

The Improve Struts Configuration File Editor for Eclipse includes a graphical view of your Struts actions and JSPs, and includes a struts-config file editor.

If you are using JSPs, you need Struts.

Improves' plug-it makes use of the SolarEclipse plug-in for JSP editing.

Another interesting Eclipse plug-in is CompleteClipse - an enhanced auto-completion widget. Looks interesting.

I'll have a play with both of these at some point.

Oh yes, a couple more interesting ones - XML buddy features syntax highlighting and DTD driven auto-completion, and the Sysdeo Eclipse Tomcat Launcher plug-in, uh, launches Tomcat, but also gives you integrated servlet debugging (with JSP debugging to come), and creates & deploys WAR files.

There are now a huge number of Eclipse plug-ins available - 133 as at the time of writing, according to Eclipse-plugins.2y.net. Looks like Eclipse's promise as a framework for all manner of development tools is starting to come true.

Shoot Things.com. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Via The Ultimate Insult.

A couple of Eclipse items today.

Eclipse unveils modeling framework - I'm not sure what the EMF will actually do. Will it provide functionality out of the box, or is it infrastructure for plug-in builders? Ah well, time will tell. It's not out yet - www.eclipse.org/ems is still 404 compliant.

IBM to shine light on new Eclipse - Eclipse, which released a test version of the new framework in June, will release a final version on Sept. 18. Huh? I didn't realise that I was using a test version. Am I? Again, time will tell...

Update: The SolarEclipse plug-in features, amongst other things, HTML and JSP syntax highlighting. JSP code assist/completion planned. Cool.

Further update: the EMF URL was wrong - it's www.eclipse.org/emf. Found via the Eclipse Wiki page. It's a framework rather than usable product (hence 'modeling' - doh!), and will be available (looks at watch) any time now.

UML modeling is already available, but hooo, it's expensive.

In A Culture of Candor, Phil Windley talks about the problem of a culture where being gentle to people's feelings is more important than the truth.

This is not the case where I am working at the moment, not really, but the right balance can be hard to find. I can be rather, uh, blunt at times, and when I first joined my company it seems that this was interpreted as arrogance. Now people know me, and they are aware that I'm not really arrogant, and that I know what I am talking about at least some of the time, the problem has gone away.

In my current team, discussions can be robust at times. That's OK, I think - we are all opinionated, and need to put our points across, but we all respect one another's abilities.

Our manager Paul finds it all very disturbing, though, worrying that all this ranting meant that we weren't getting anywhere. (Mark and I are particularly amenable to a good rant.) Now he tries to leave us alone to get on with it, and no longer tries to 'facilitate' our meetings. He's still unhappy, though, and I can see why - throw the wrong personality into our team, and it could turn into a real problem.

Punk Kittens

Well it's not totally useless - there are a few useful shortcuts...

Windows Key + D - Show Desktop*
Windows Key + E - Windows Explorer
Windows Key + F - Find Files or Folders...
Windows Key + M - Minimize All Windows
Windows Key + Shift+M - Undo Minimize All
Windows Key + R - Run...
Windows Key + Tab - Select Task
Windows Key + Break - System Properties
Windows Key + F - Windows Help
* Requires Internet Explorer 4.0 Desktop Update.

Not all that much there, eh? Well, WinKey allows you to assign your own shortcuts. Dead handy. Recommended for all Windows victims users.

Using Eclipse? Stuck with VSS for source control? Then you need Marcus Nylander's VSS Plugin for Eclipse.

Seems to work pretty well. The initial refresh from VSS takes an age, which is inevitable, but after that it's all really smooth, and much more convenient than swapping between Eclipse and VSS Explorer and navigating down to whatever it is that you want to check out or whatever.

BTW - some useful Eclipse options here, including -vmargs, which allows you to pass arguments to the underlying VM.

An end to OutOfMemory errors, perhaps? Just shove -vmargs -Xmx128m on the end of your Eclipse shortcut, and off you go. (See java - the Java application launcher for available VM arguments as at Java 1.3).

I am better than your kids.

If you work in an office with lots of people, chances are that you work with a person who hangs pictures up that their kids have drawn. The pictures are always of some stupid flower or a tree with wheels. These pictures suck; I could draw pictures much better.

Via dutchbint.

The Insects from Shaggy - Scooby Doo meets The Call of Cthulhu.

Via FARK.

Sun's CEO Scott McNealy contends that Open Source is hurting Sun (and J2EE) in its fight against Microsoft (and 'NET).

In Sun's J2EE Standard Needs JBoss, Marc Fleury, JBoss founder, contends this.

O'Reilly's William Crawford has some interesting reflections on all this in J2EE Open Source.

VB and Java the only successful languages of the last two decades? Hmmm. Well, it really depends upon how you define successful. In terms of market share, I suppose that he's right, but people are successfully using Python, Ruby, Haskell, Objective C, PHP, Tcl and especially (shudder) Perl to develop useful tools, to name but a few. None of which detracts from his essential points.

It is certainly true that Java isn't really delivering revenue for Sun. But then, as Joel points out (Headline: Sun Develops Java; New "Bytecode" System Means Write Once, Run Anywhere), a hardware company developing a system which effectively makes hardware a commodity was always rather an odd decision. I'm not sure that you can pin the blame on Open Source!

The Alanis Morissette Lyric Generator

"Will to Live"

I feel miserable
Arrays make me ill
I feel miserable
Castings tear at my foundations
I feel miserable
Types are dragging me down to the depths of misery
I want to die

Is it because of Java that I feel this way?
With the blue rays of misery pounding on my brain?
Or am I lost in tale of Seamus Heaney, adrift far from home
I don't think so, I don't think so.

Amber Broke My Will to Live
Amber Broke My Will to Live
Amber Broke My Will to Live
I was getting better but then
Amber Broke My Will to Live

I feel miserable
Threads rot the flesh from my bones
I feel miserable
GUIs defeat my purpose
I feel miserable
Loops are doing their best to impale my soul
I want to die

Is it because of Java that I feel this way?
With the blue rays of misery pounding on my brain?
Am I lost in tale of Seamus Heaney, adrift far from home
I don't think so, I don't think so.

Amber Broke My Will to Live
Amber Broke My Will to Live
Oh God, Amber Broke My Will to Live
I was getting better but then
Amber Broke My Will to Live

Sure, you can throw hand grenades at Unix, but when the smoke clears, all the little parts will still be twitching. In an hour or two, Unix will reassemble itself, and start shuffling towards you again.

The EffNews Project: Building an RSS Newsreader

If this is up to /F's usual standard, this should be very educational.

I look forward to part two - but don't hurry it, Fredrik. When it's ready.

Swish Cottage likes xXx. I think that I'll have to see it. ;-)

Ow! My brain hurts!

Via b3ta.

Tellie-Targets - therapy for those whose children make them watch kid's TV.

Via FARK.

I'm an intelligent viewer. Get me out of here!

David Aaronovitch blasts the latest dreadful UK reality TV programme. It is like laughing at someone with Tourette's. Ouch!

From cancer to Aids: the RNAi revolution is gathering pace

RNAi looks very exciting. Whole new areas of genetic medicine could be opening up.

The Python UK conference 2003 looks like it's going to be good. I'll try and save up and attend both days next year.

Bravo Andy for all his hard work so far. The word committee strikes fear into my heart. But then, no one likes them, they are sometimes a necessary evil, and Andy can't do it all on his own, so I have put myself forward to help.

There is no way that I could do a talk, though. Not only do I not really have much that I could talk about apropos Python, but also I am seriously phobic about public speaking.

It will be exciting to meet Guido, I must say!

There I was, typing away, when suddenly, the power went out.

This was at 4 p.m. BST yesterday.

Apparently, someone cut through a power line with a digger down by Tower Hill. I hope no one was hurt. A big chunk of the city lost power, and they estimated that it wouldn't come back until between seven and eight.

So I went down the pub. ;-)

Update: I gather that the power wasn't back until after ten. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one whose estimates are out by 50%!

IT is not geeky, says industry group.

Clearly they have never visited my office...

	You are Kermit! Though you're technically the star, you're pretty mellow and don't mind letting others share the spotlight. You are also something of a dreamer.
Take the What Muppet Are You? Quiz!

Which Peanuts Character Are You Quiz

Via fozbaca.

I'm The James Bond Villain Personality Test!

I live in a fictional world of spies and blonde women with ridiculous names, and I like to give people plenty of options. Although whether they're villainous is not optional.

Click here to find out which test you are!

Via iamcal.

New York Defender

Via The Ultimate Insult. He made me do it. Honest.

And this isn't much better.

The reality tv/gameshow programme idea generator. Classic.

I have just this lunchtime discovered that one of my colleagues is a Jainist. Well I never!

My mother is a Buddhist, and an ex-colleague of mine is a Pagan. All very interesting religions.

Me, I'm an atheist, a real one, and all these theists look equally odd to me...

Update September 5th: I think that the reason that these religions seem so benign to me is that their adherents don't need to keep being reminded about the most important rule. While the big three (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are all religions of peace in theory, in practice they seem to promote bigotry, zealotry and violence in at least some of their adherents. This is also true, though to a lesser extent, of Hinduism.

The rise and decline of Java/C++ programmers

This are US figures, yeah, but more or less the same is happening this side of the pond. Computer Weekly was down to two pages of non-public sector jobs last week. The number of my ex-colleagues out of work is truly frightening.

At least my project is making money. There is some reassurance in that.

But will the market pick up again? I think so, but not just yet, and not to the level that it reached during the golden years of the late nineties. CEOs are looking for dead-cert projects these days.

Java hits obstacle with cell phones

So much for Evo on mobile phones...

A Comparison Of Microsoft's C# Programming Language to Sun Microsystems' Java Programming Language

Some interesting stuff here.

Java desperately needs a foreach statement, properties and variable length argument lists. Especially foreach.

C# isn't cross platform, and exception handling looks weak.

Naturally, Python has all this. God, Python programmers are spoiled!

Update September 13th: A Comparative Overview of C#, another C# vs. Java comparison.

Java Server Pages (JSPs) can easily tempt you into what Bitter Java refers to as the Monolithic JSP antipattern.

The solution to this is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The Struts framework exists to help you implement this.

Struts, an open-source MVC implementation is an excellent introduction to Struts and the MVC pattern. It also covers tag libraries - J2EE's way of avoiding the ugly mixture of HTML and Java which can easily result from JSP development.

The example shows a typical Monolithic JSP refactorerd into three simple components, only one of them Java code. Beautiful.

Struts and Tiles aid component-based development covers updates to the Struts framework between versions 0.9 and 1.1.

The protocol Bush tried to kill lives to fight another day.

The US along with Australia are now the only major industrialised nations to have failed to ratify Kyoto.

Bush will just do as he pleases, though, as usual.

Random recently updated weblog, driven from Weblogs.com.

Waste more time more easily than ever before!

The Google Glossary, at Google Labs. Very cool.

Don't visit JunkBot, and certainly don't try playing it. Not if you want to get any work done.

Via Ned Batchelder.

Also found at his site - Letterscapes, in pure Java would you believe. Cool. Totally pointless, but cool.

Eclipse-Workbench.com is a site dedicated to the Eclipse open-source community.

It links to articles and plug-ins, and has an FAQ.

Also worth a browse - the Eclipse Wiki. The JDT Key Bindings, Remote Java Debugging and Interesting information got by Martin Möbius
pages are all worth a look.

BTW, Eclipse 2.0.1 is out. I used the Software Update feature to update automatically, and it worked fine - as smooth as silk. The same cannot be said for a couple of my colleagues - it didn't seem to do anything for them.

Ah well - Mark has never got on with Eclipse. It just doesn't like him. I think that it's 'cos he's a VB man at heart - Eclipse resents it. I've recommended to him that he stick to Notepad. Or EDLIN.

Mark Jason Dominus' advice for programmers. Very funny.

Not just funny, though. Very true, also.

Via Aaron Swartz.

It's the end for SatireWire, alas.

Andrew Marlatt has put up links to some of his favorite stories. I particularly like:

• High school students demand wars in easier-to-find countries
• Axis of just as evil
• Police must notify residents when Catholic church moves into neighborhood
• Americans annoyed by "all this international shit" on Internet
• Foot-and-mouth believed to be first virus unable to spread through Microsoft Outlook
• Employee-slapping widespread, effective
• Study finds you really don't make a difference

SimWork!

Via The Ultimate Insult.

Eric's Webspace has some fab tips on DOS and Windows script writing.

Combine with Unix utilities for Windows, and you can get a lot done.

Of course, you really ought to be using a real scripting language...

Java bits & bobs.

• Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java, 3rd Edition, is in Beta. Still the best 1st Java book on the market.
• Sun's Tech Tips. Loads of good stuff here.
• I'm an open source kind of guy, but I have to work for a living - Protect your bytecodes from reverse engineering/decompilation
• The Marvin Obfuscator
• For the hardcore techies only - Bytecode basics
• Printing in Java, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. Everything you need to know about Java 1.3 printing, and a useful printing framework.
• jalice.net. Lots of good graphics, printing and GUI snippets.
• Java Boutique
• An introduction to object prevalence. I have mentioned Prevayler before.

Update:

• Java XML Pack


• Using the Java Plug-in in Intranet Environments


• The Top Ten Cool New Features of Java 1.4