Ow!

Via Blogjam.

BOHICA - Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. A fine motto for all who suffer under incompetent management.

Via vodkabird - The fridge simply isn't big enough for cheap wine and food.

A friend of mine needs to process some XML on the '400 with RPG. I pointed him at these:

• XML Toolkit for iSeries
• XML Interface for RPG

Good luck, Paul!

The History of the Tilde

The worst has happened - I have to learn VB, so that I can look after some VB scripts that we use as part of our build process while our VB-head, Mark, is on honeymoon.

Then I come across this - Thirteen ways to loathe VB. Cancel the wedding, I say.

Actually, it's not quite as bad as all that. I'll get to teach everyone Python in return, and I'm confident that it will be well received. I reckon that I'll base the training on the first three chapters of Dive Into Python, then wing it on some more advanced topics. See what people are most interested in - COM, GUI building, regular expressions, web programming, Jython/Java integration, DB-API, that sort of thing.

Update 8th October: Mike Mitchell defends VB, and Verity Stob kicks the shit out of it again.

See also - Microsoft kicks the shit out of VB - VB.NET incompatibilities with VB 6.

Plenty of new stuff today:

• Using Castor JDO for SQL Mapping. (A follow up to Get started with Castor JDO.)
• Top Ten New Things You Can Do with NIO. NIO is the new I/O API.
• Is Complexity Hurting Java? Succor for the acronym blind.
• From COBOL or RPG to Java
• Java Interviews - What Might They Ask Me? A good test of Java general knowledge, this.
• WebSphere Studio version 5
• DynamicJava. Not an article, this, but an interesting bit of kit.