TN5250j is a 5250 terminal emulator for the AS/400 written in Java, which allows Python scripting!
(Well, Jython scripting, to be precise.)
This is going to be so useful...
Via Daily Python-URL
Ted Neward's 85 of 101 Reasons, Rebutted is a very thorough and non-partisan response to Carlos Perez's 101 Reasons Java is better than Dot-Net.
As I think I've said before, I'd like Java to stay better than .NET, but it's only going to do so by recognising where .NET has advantages, and stealing them. If Java can also steal good ideas from other arenas, then so much the better.
Via Dave Johnson
Want to read and write Word and Excel files from Java? Opening Microsoft File Formats to Java tells you how. Or at least some of how.
This article tells you how to use Apache POI to read the OLE 2 Compound Document format, which both Word and Excel use, but it doesn't tell you how to read the application specific structures.
Actually, I have always used Python for this kind of work. And since Word & Excel are installed on all the machines that I want to run my utilities on, COM automation (at which Python excels) was the obvious solution. Worked, too.
AMK's Perl 6 and Python 3000 is an interesting read.
The total Python re-write, Python 3000, definitely isn't going to happen. Joel says that you shouldn't re-write working software at all, but Python is being re-written. It's just that it's being re-written one piece at a time.
I particularly like Tim's line - The "ain't broke, don't fix" philosophy is a good guide here, provided you've got a very low threshold for insisting "it's broke" <0.4 wink>.
Anthony Eden is giving a presentation on Scripting Java Applications with Jython at the upcoming Python UK Conference 2003. I, for one, am really looking forward to this.
Other people that I'm looking forward to: Marc-André Lemburg, Alex Martelli and Andy Todd.
And, of course, Guido himself. We are not worthy.
Update: I forgot to mention - Anthony has blogged about this before.
BNP takes fifth council seat. What's going on here?
I'm proud to be British, but the Britain that I'm proud to be a part of is a tolerant one. The current furore over asylum seekers sickens me. Britain has historicaly benefited from immigration.
The blog bug is spreading - my chum Stevan Rose has started his own blog - neveratoss. (Can you spot where the name came from?)
He's a Yorkshire lad, and never short of an opinion or two, so it should make interesting reading.
I'll see you for a beer, Steve, after you get back from skiing. Enjoy!
More heat than light, as usual, over at Slashdot.
Still, the Salon editorial, Is there hope for Java? is an interesting read, covering the history of Microsoft's attempts to kill Java off.
TIOBE's Programming Community Index is total rubbish, though. RPG on the way up? I'm a iSeries (a.k.a AS/400) developer, and I know that this is way wrong. Python on the way down? Far from it. Where did they get these figures? What did they google on?
My take on the future of Java is that it's bright, so long as the competition from .NET is taken seriously. A bit of healthy competition never does any harm, and Sun needed a bit of a kick in the arse - Java has been static for too long. C# fas some nice features, and Java needs to steal them.
Jason Orendorff's path module is an object oriented wrapper for Python's os.path stuff. Very nice!
I already have a replacement for the workable, but dog-ugly, os.path.walk, but this goes much further.
Via Daily Python-URL.
As as V5R1, you can journal changes to data areas and data queues. See Add a Safety Net with Journalized Data Queues for an overview.
Now this is useful. I've always shied away from data areas and data queues, partly because you can't journal them. The other reason is that I'm a relational database bigot, and data areas and data queues just don't feel right.
So, data areas and data queues will still probably be plan B, 'cos of the second reason that I mention, but I won't feel quite so dead set against then in future. After all, both object types can be pretty useful at times.
'Journalize' seems to be an Americanism - on the UK, I've only ever heard it referred to as 'journaling'. A bit odd, this - most IT related Americanisms (disk, program, and so forth) make it across the pond unchanged, which is fair enough, really, since most refer to things invented in the US. But 'journalize' didn't, possibly because it really jars on the British ear.
A list of Python programmer's weblogs. I've added those that I read. Any more?
No Python equivalent of java.blogs around. There may not be enough Python around to make it worthwhile making one. Or are there?
Via the effbot.
If Esher were still alive, he'd be doing stuff like this.
Via Simon Willison.
We use SoftReferences for Caching in an an app which I'm currently working on. Bob Lee points out some interesting things about caching with SoftReferences.
We are certainly not getting the performance that we'd hoped for - perhaps this could explain why?
Or perhaps SortReferences just aren't working at all...
I'm not really sure whether mouse-gestures are really silly, or really cool. Both, probably.
Anyway, StrokeIt is a fun little toy which lets you use mouse gestures to drive just about any Windows app. Have fun!
Via Markus Kohler.
Boa Constructor alpha 0.2 is now available.
Try this with the new version of wxPython.
Version 0.1 didn't really work. I gather that you could get a working version via CVS from Sourceforge, but that felt a little too much like hard work. Hopefully, version 0.2 should work straight out of the box.
Update: Doesn't work for me - bug reported...
Drivers should pay up and stop complaining. You tell 'em, Natasha!
A bit of background for non-Brits, well, non-Londoners, perhaps: London's roads are grinding to a halt. There is no room for any more roads, so public transport is the only answer. (Well, that and more bikes.)
In order to drive people off the road and onto public transport, London's Mayor, Ken Livingston, is introducing a 'congestion' charge, i.e. a charge for driving a car into central London. Naturally, drivers are up in arms about this.
I might say that I've lived in London for all but a couple of years of my life, and I've always found public transport perfectly adequate. And yes, I do have children.
Every year 10,000 tons of steel goes into making paper clips
A few years back, undoubtedly during a slowdown in the economy, Lloyd's Bank of London decided to attempt to solve the paper clip paradox. It tracked a batch of 100,000 paper clips within its bank. Here is what it found: 25,000 were simply lost "in the shuffle," swept up or vacuumed into oblivion; 19,413 served as card game chips; 14,163 were twisted and made useless during phone conversations; 7,200 were used as hooks for belts, suspenders or bras; 5,434 were used to pick teeth or scratch ears; 5,308 were used as nail cleaners; 3,196 were used as pipe cleaners.
The remaining 20,286, or about 20%, were used for their intended purpose of clipping papers together.
Concurrency made simple introduces Doug Lea's util.concurrent package, which includes must-haves like work queues and thread pools.
Brian Goetz's point about reinventing the wheel is also well made.
Also from developerWorks recently - Introduction to the Thin Client Framework.
Ned Batchelder on Erroneously Empty Code Paths. Wise words.
Ted Neward thinks that .NET is viable on other platforms.
Is it just me, though, or are his points one and two somewhat contradictory? He says that WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. won't be available off Windows. If you start leaving this sort of stuff out, how valuable is .NET anyway?
J2EE is indeed separate from, J2SE, but it's every bit as cross-platform, and every bit as free (i.e. free as in beer, but not free as in speech).
IBM's Decimal Arithmetic FAQ is an interesting read.
Coming from an AS/400 background, I'm used to having decimal arithmetic around (albeit somewhat limited in terms of functionality). It is mainly used to store monetary values. Using floating point to store monetary values sucks.
Python doesn't come with a fixed decimal type, but the FixedPoint class will probably make it into the standard library at some point.
Ollie Rutherfurd has a bunch of useful macros for jEdit on his site, most of them written in Jython.
Useful in themselves, but also good examples to get you started if you were to want to write some of your own macros for jEdit.
The Bean Scripting Framework is now part of the Jakarta project. When did this happen?
Via Ricardo.
Add .py and .pyw to PATHEXT on Windows
I'll try to avoid using the ellipsis in future, honest...
Damn! Did it again!
JobStats - the current state of the UK computing job market.
This is a little depressing - I was hoping that the worst might be over, but the graph on the JobStats site doesn't look too healthy...
Microsoft is accused by UK firm of tapping into its secrets
Microsoft's unethical business practises don't usually get much of a mention in the mainstream UK media, so I was pleased to see this piece in my daily paper this morning.