Archives for the Month of April, 2008

The Rejection Letter

Drayton Bird posted a wonderfully written rejection letter from the BBC.

If link appears broken, here’s a link to the image.
Drayton notes that the operative sentence reads:
“You may also like to note that calling our head of human resources a skank ho does not gain you any plus points when being shortlisted for a position.”
[link]

Managing Conflict Errors in Zope

Sometimes, your Zope application may be unnecessarily writing too many times to the database. An easy way to track what objects are being written to is to use the analyze.py utility. Look at the Count and Pct, and make sure that relatively static objects do not get too many writes.
$ ../../bin/python analyze.py Data.fs
Processed 13382 records [...]

Open Source Education Consulting at Middle School in Bronx

James Governor has talked about open source industry analysis, I attended a talk organised by the ACS Toowoomba chapter, from an open source consultant. No he doesn’t implement Linux servers. Pat Wagner does his consulting openly, and blogs publicly about how his consulting engagement is going over at the 339 middle school in New York.
Pat [...]

ZODBCDA Database Adapters and Oracle Drivers

If your Zope application is unstable (i.e. crashing) running ZODBCDA against Oracle drivers, try turning off Connection Pooling.

C# 3.0 and 3.5 for experienced developers.

Python developers are probably already familiar with List Comprehensions, and lambda expressions. The interesting twist with LINQ is these expressions are translated into SQL and executed on the RDBMS instead of being done on the client side. There was a pretty clever Python project that achieved this in Python through dissassembly of python bytecodes, but [...]

Mobile Technology

I’ve been listening to MIX’08 talking about new uses for mobile phones and I came across this piece of news:
Man divorces two wives in three minutes (via SMS) link (includes photos of two disappointed women)
Interestingly, it appears that the women initiated the proceedings.
[Justice] Wan Abdul Malik said this was the first time in the [...]

Book Review - Rain Making - Ford Harding

Ford Harding wrote: “Sales mean survival”, and Rain Making is aimed at teaching what most schools (engineering, accounting, law) have neglected to teach - knowing how to build a business, and to have “more control over one’s destiny.”
I was fortunate to receive a review copy. It’s a good read, and I know of a [...]