What Level Programmer Are You?

Everybody’s talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.]

But what’s a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say “Everybody is going to have to know programming” what, exactly, does that mean?

via What Level Programmer Are You?.

More EU Bollocks.

The EU Creed – “Try and Try again there is no do”

The negotiations have gone on for months. If you truly believe that it’s about making Greece’s’ debts more affordable you’re mad, this is about setting targets that are impossible to meet, thus creating a situation wherein Greece becomes a third world country outside the EU, and all the unelected eurocrats cry “We did our best, we spent months working on a plan”. We already know its win, win for the bondholders anyway link , link, and the US is heavily leaning on Germany to do what ever is possible to stop the inevitable default bleeding the fed dry.

Saturday 4th February 2012

Euro zone finance ministers told Greece it could not go ahead with an agreed deal to restructure privately held debt until it guaranteed to implement reforms to secure a second financing package from the euro zone and the IMF.

via Euro zone insists no Greek rescue without reforms | Reuters.

Sunday 5th February 2012

Greece’s prime minister scrambled Sunday to convince lenders and politicians to sign off on a 130 billion euro rescue, after his finance minister said just hours remained to clinch a deal to avoid a messy default.

Via Greece on “knife edge” in push to agree bailout

Analysis 24 January 2012

So, they’re going through a drawn-out step-by-step procedure of demands for reforms, promises, failed implementations, rebukes, withheld bailout transfers that then might still be made, and so on. The idea is to keep markets from panicking, give governments time to prepare for the inevitable, and render politicians blameless for Greece’s exit from the monetary union.

Via Paying Lip Service To Saving The Eurozone

Use the ODBC predicate? Mental ODBC + Prolog

While I can kind of see the point of why it might be useful, just like Prolog-Java bridges are sometimes useful if it works – which is almost never. It still seems a bit mental to be using mySQL with prolog.

If you really are using prolog, the data you get from prolog and its database (I had the mis-fortune of studying this 3 times) aren’t really congruent with mySQL.

One is highly structured tabular, the other is derived and organised in a hierarchy, if you need storage for you’d probably be better dumping text files, or get with the hipsters in the NoSQL camp.

Prolog in Python (pt. 2) : ryePDX.

tl;dr