Julian C. Dunn

… describes perfectly my thoughts about marketing weasels. (D=Dilbert, M=Marketing Weasel)

D: This product would melt the polar ice caps and doom humanity.
M: That’s okay.
D: You’re part of humanity.
M: No, I’m in marketing.
D: I won’t help you destroy the planet.
M: That’s what I said until I saw the free t-shirts.

Aside from having to sell your soul, it appears that working in marketing is a dream job. Spend the company’s money with no accountability, hire subordinates solely on the basis of breast size, and if management tries to nail you for poor sales, blame the developers.

Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t go to school for five years to be overriden by some marketing drone whose qualifications for the job include being a clerk at Chapters, and her physical attractiveness. Period.

SQLite

I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks really cool. It’s basically an almost-SQL92 complete implementation of a database engine without a separate database process required — the databases are stored on disk as files. I’m hazarding a guess that this sprung from the limitations of Berkeley DB as a scalable, lightweight file-based database implementation.

Surprisingly the missing features list (that stop it short of full SQL92 compliance) is fairly short, which implies to me that even transactions are supported.

Seems like a great tool for small jobs where a full-blown PostgreSQL or MySQL database is just overkill.

I decided today that I don’t always want to sound like a crusty old coot in this journal, so I thought I should write a quick journal entry about what I consider to be fantastic pieces of software. So briefly, here are my top five nominations. Continue reading…