Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here's my round up of some of the heftier Rules Engines around from The Register:

Rules engines are now a common business tool, helping automate what are often complex decision-making processes. Now with web front-ends and business language IDEs, there's a lot to look at when choosing your software.

While some tools help transfer business logic change responsibilities from developers to business users, others mean learning a whole new way of programming, using declarative languages to separate business logic from data – without changing the essential object-oriented nature of your applications.

Read the rest here.
2000 words on iLog, on JBoss and Fair Isaac.

Enjoy the fun of a Torchwood/Under Milk Wood pastiche courtesy of the one and only Verity Stob.

Come close now. Zoom in, chopper-shot to crane-shot, down over Roald Dahl-As-We-Expected Plass and its mobile phone mast fountain and, deep, deep below, in his secret underground headquarters,

SECOND VOICE Captain Jack,

CAPTAIN JACK
Hi. I'm Captain Jack Harkness.

SECOND VOICE the insomniac bicon; snug as a hobbit, pretty as a choirboy, immortal as carbon dioxide, wooden as a horse. He is passing the small hours sweeping up pterodactyl droppings,

CAPTAIN JACK
They get everywhere.

SECOND VOICE and cataloguing his prize collection of alien artefacts,

CAPTAIN JACK
One off gadget for choosing the quickest queue at Tesco, check. And one off purple wig for a girlie going to the moon, check. And one off bottle of stuff for getting pterodactyl pturds off greatcoats, check.

It says it all, really, it does...

An interesting interview with Iain Banks on his return to the convoluted family saga in the Times:

IAIN BANKS WAS ONCE ASKED what his motto was. The answer? “Oh, what the hell.”

A bit flippant for a life philosophy, perhaps, but it’s an attitude that has made for a brilliant, breakneck career: having set heads spinning with his gruesome, gothic debut The Wasp Factory in 1984, Banks has published a further 22 books in the subsequent 23 years, a production rate not matched by any of his peers from the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list of 1993.

Looks like I'll be adding The Steep Approach To Garbadale to The Bookcase Of Unread Books At The Top Of The Stairs soon...

Oddly I was walking round London listening to the BBC radio reading of The Crow Road on my iPod the day before yesterday...

[Linkage via Blog of a Bookslut]

Crocuses in a Soho churchyard - a splash of colour in a drab, grey February London.

London
February 2007