thoughts

KDE, Kubuntu, and a bit of rant.

So much for that. Again. A while ago and in quite a verbose way I announced my move to KDE 4.x, specifically in the Kubuntu 13.04 distribution which I adopted in early alpha, as most of the time. Finally. After fancying with this particular desktop environment for quite a while. Well guess I’ll better keep quiet about things like that by now, sitting in front of an XFCE machine again as I write this, not ending up with a desktop that is “lightweight” or “un-bloated” but, well, with a desktop that seems to just have a better balance between features and usability, at the moment. Not sure. Some more thoughts on that to follow, read on…

Read moreKDE, Kubuntu, and a bit of rant.

SAP MaxDB with Python

By now it should be known we’re notorious users of SAP MaxDB in a “non-SAP environment”, and, for that matter, we have done rather well throughout the last seven years. By now, we gained quite some experience running, administering, working with that RDBMS in our environment, and we manage to get our production work done on top of it without thinking about it all too much which seems a good thing. However, there are several nuissances about that platform, both talking about political SAP product and licensing decisions and about overall technical issues, lack of support for most of the neat tools, toys and frameworks included.

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Refactoring and removing.

Deleted code doesn’t contain bugs, they say. I always felt kind of unsafe with the idea of actually and straightforward removing code while into refactoring smaller or larger parts of the systems – after all, same as it doesn’t contain bugs, deleted code also doesn’t contain business logic anymore which might not be what you want at times. Yet, trying to clean up parts of (the Java / Java EE based) components in our system, I have to some degree changed my mind about that.

Read moreRefactoring and removing.