the corner office

Phew. The working year is over, and we're off to Durbs for a few weeks of relaxing, family and mostly studying like crazy for exams in January.

This is likely my last blog posting of 2005, so here's wishing you a splendid whatever-it-is-you-celebrate, and a happy new year!

I have no compunction about referring to Jacob Zuma as a dishonest crook, and I had no compunction about doing it before the Shaik verdict sealed the deal. It was just bloody obvious.

The rape charges brought against Zuma are a different story though. I'm not sure what to make of it. It feels irresponsible to condemn Zuma before he's been properly tried, and yet it feels irresponsible not to acknowledge the gravity of the allegations. They're just an entirely different level of seriousness. There was a lot of speculation that it was just a stunt to sink Zuma politically, but the state must feel it has sufficient evidence, or else they'd have dropped the charges? In this case I think the only safe stance is to wait until the courts have convicted or acquitted him.

Either way, I suspect that only the most pathologically corrupt, stupid or demented in the ANC's power structures will continue to stick with Zuma through this, and I suspect that Mbeki will arranging a long walk on a very short political pier for them, if he hasn't already.

A LifeGem is not just any diamond:

The LifeGem® is a certified, high-quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique life.

They do pets, too.

Here's an obscure but potentially important performance tip a colleague passed on to me:

There is a serious performance problem that can arise when connecting a Java application to a SQL Server 2000 database. Many developers are not aware of the issue or how to avoid it. The essence of the problem is this: By default, most, if not all, Java middleware drivers send string parameters to SQL Server as unicode. If the unicode (16 bit) parameters reference VARCHAR (8 bit) key columns in an index, SQL Server will not use the index to resolve the query, resulting in many unnecessary table scans.

Solution? Tell your driver to send ASCII parameters. Not ideal in some i18n situations(*), but perfectly useful in others. The article has a list of parms to set for common SQL Server drivers.

(*) Update: me not thinking. If you needed Unicode values, I guess you'd be using NVARCHAR anyway.

This is pretty grim news (via Fodder). There's some weird stuff going down with the currents in the North Atlantic, and there are some sensationalist/serious fears that Europe is heading for new (mini) ice age. I mean, a new ice age would be pretty cool if it meant the Woolly Mammoths were coming back, because they rock, but on the down side it would mean a lot of hunger and misery and death and, well, ice.

The Constitutional Court says that if two people want to marry, it doesn't matter how many willies are or aren't part of the equation. The government has one year to get their act together, or the CC will get it together for them.

Now we just need to wait for God to start smiting us. But given that this ruling hardly seems to have raised a whimper, maybe God won't mind if we don't.