Here's part of a recent email, subject "Antique Programmer in search of face lift and/or brain transplant as appropriate...". It was from a VP/Director kind of person who'd been away from hands-on technology for a few years.

"I’ve got a new Vista PC with dual drives so …

Since I spend a lot of time on skill upgrades for my clients, my books are oriented around that theme. It's something that I learned from Jim Bullock : there's a Clue Absorption Rate, and you can't exceed that rate. These books are about building skills incrementally.

I've got three Python-related …

Why Python, indeed?

"It's clear that you find it easier and quicker to use Python, and that's fine. It's often quickest for people to use the tools that they know best."

As they say on Fark.com, "This".

However, the Python advantage doesn't stem from knowing Python better than Java …

The question seemed simple, which testing framework is the simplest? The situation is complex. There's a web application, there are developers and there are testers. The developers develop, and the testers test. So far, not so complex.

Here's the complexity. The testers are pretty focused on manual point-and-click testing. They …

The problem with Python is the vastness of the Open Source community. You may think you have something cool for HTML parsing , but then someone tells you about Beautiful Soup which already does it.

In my defense, I actually did a version of this HTML parsing back in '02. Indeed …

The mixed content model, defined succinctly in the XML standards, is pleasant enough for human communication, but leaves a lot to be desired. For example, mapping a mixed content model to a relational database is a hard problem.

The problem is made worse when the document is HTML. HTML doesn't …

I think that learning Java is challenging. You've got to learn the language, object-oriented programming, the libraries and the endless Java Technologies. The Java landscape is crowded with J*tx* and tx J add-ons, where tx is some technology abbreviation; for example, JAXWS, JAXB, SAAJ, JMS, JFC, JCE, JAAS, etc …

The Cubulus project and Alexandru Toth 's page describe an "OLAP Aggregation Engine". It is very nice to see advanced work done on the dimensional model.

The cited research dates from 1999 (V. Markl, F. Ramsak, R. Bayer, "Improving OLAP Performance by Multidimensional Hierarchical Clustering", Proceedings of the Intl. Database …

Thanks to everyone who attended. See Designing Web Services with the J2EE(TM) 1.4 Platform : JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies for more information. Also, check out Dr. Dobb's SOA, Web Services and XML department.

Here's the Micro$oft PPT file: Web Services 8.ppt

Here's the Open-Office file: Web …

After having written a number of application-specific object-relational mappers, I have been on the prowl for an elegant, enduring solution. I had started to come to grips with Django , and like much of the approach. Django has a tiny infrastructure feature (the settings.py file) which made it unpleasant to …