Sri Lanka (nee Ceylon) is famous for its tea and Arthur C. Clarke, but, as I found out, there’s much more to it than that!
We started in Negombo, a beach resort a few miles away from the airport, moved round to take in the ‘Cultural Triangle’, down to Kandy, Adams Peak and a tea plantation. Finally, we headed to Unawatuna, a beach resort near to Galle (and the England – Sri Lanka test series) and then back to Negombo for the last night. We made plenty of stops along the route.
Introduction
PL/SQL is good for many things. It has a structured, Ada-like syntax and can have SQL statements seamlessly embedded in it. Although not compiled right down to machine code, it’s even fairly quick.
But one thing that most people initially have difficulty doing is displaying information on the screen. The first thing I did was to enter what I wanted into a temporary table and use SQL*Plus to select from it. This works well for reports at the like, but it doesn’t work at all if you want to display something independently of a transaction or halfway through a function.
v1.2, 17 January 2001
With the current Linux trend towards multi-million dollar IPO’s and “Open Source” software, much of the emphasis of “free” software has been lost leaving people new to the fold confused and not completely understanding all the implications. This HOWTO will, hopefully, reduce some of that confusion.
What’s in here?
This document talks in non-technical terms about free software, what it means and why you should care about more than just the cost of your software.
Introduction
The open source community does a lot of things right. The internals of a program is one of them. The people who write code do so because they are proud of what they do and want the respect of other people in the community. The beauty of the code is a very important aspect in this acceptance.
The same isn’t necessarily true in the commercial world. Time-scales are much more important than how the guts of a computer system looks and it’s generally not good to be seen spending a bit of time making your code look pretty.
Introduction
Perhaps more than any other engineering discipline (see Steve McConnell’s After The Gold Rush), software engineers work on projects that have no real chance of success. There are as many reasons why as there are projects, but if you want to be in with a chance of surviving such a ‘death march’ this could be the book for you.
Content
Edward Yourdon is a well known and well respected computer scientist, so what useful information can he give you in these circumstances? Surely you’re lumbered with the simple choice between putting up with it or resigning?
Everyone will be very pleased to hear that Oracle’s third attempt at producing a usable database product on Linux has largely been successful. The first two usually worked but only after much aggravation. Forget all the extras that 8.1.6 provides, you can get the thing installed with much less grief!
Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was simple and straight-forward all the time. It is Oracle that we’re talking about here.
Introduction
Many developers would hate to have their master-work described as a mess, but not Larry Wall, creator of Perl and celebrity hacker. The way he sees it, the language is a mess because the problem domain — real life — is also a mess. He has a point.
I first came across Perl a few years ago when I was writing a program that required a certain amount of ‘screen-scraping’ from a telnet session, the ability to retrieve files using FTP, some complex processing and interaction with an Oracle database. This is a fairly messy problem, and one that Perl looked eminently able to solve.
It is now two days after Microsoft’s official release of ‘the next generation’ of their premier operating system, Windows 2000 (n?e, NT5). We’re now at a safe distance to be able to assess the impact it has had on people and the press.
The first interesting thing to note is that on Slashdot, the Internet’s favorite site for hacker-oriented hi-tech news, did not make any announcement. One argument is that Slashdot is Linux, or at least Unix, biased making Windows news irrelevant. I don’t buy that. What Microsoft is doing is important if Linux is to achieve world domination.