Not the dog-days of summer...

...certainly, but the tedium of awaiting information on the larger parameters of my life such as...

- When and under what conditions will our Emerson employment be terminated?

- When will two promised offers come in so I can make the final decision regarding all three offers?

All three offers promise similar fulfillment. Well, there was a standing one, but I refused it this evening. I'm not ready to take the blue pill and consign myself to Matrix assimilation. Maybe someday when diving dumpsters behind McDonald's has become my last resort, I'll prostrate myself before the agents of Microsoft, bedim my horizons and intone the mantra of .NET. So, two potential offers only now, I guess. "Tell me when will you be mine, tell me quando, quando..."

In the meantime, I'm polishing off a recent review of SQL which, for me, was always a little like typing: something I began doing long before I sat down to acquire the knowledge formally. And, yes, as usual, I've made a stab at writing it up on Hot Chocolate.

And, just today, I'm initiating myself to RESTful web services using Jersey—on the server end of things. I've written to REST services before as a client, but I'm keenly interested in perfecting my understanding of this server end of things. After walking this road a few miles, there will of course be a tutorial. And, while I'm on the subject...

RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity by Subbu Allamaraju rocks as a recipe book. It dissects each HTTP operation, discusses problems of idempotency, how to get around problems of and temptation toward statefulness, and describes schemes for asynchrony. Do you know what (and only what) to do with OPTION? Do you know what trouble awaits a service providing TRACE in production mode? What should you try to do with PUT versus using POST? Get this book at a hefty discount from amazon.com.

Summer tedium's remedy

As has happened before, running through the 44-odd episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey brings some relief. It also heightens my antagonism toward split infinitives, imprecision and other abuses of the English language. So, there is a back-slap effect obliging me to watch my tongue more carefully.