What kind of nut? I particularly like cashews and almonds

Ah, the world of blogging! I just found this comment about me on another blog:

"I'm a big fan of Steven Feuerstein, as everyone knows. However, it looks like this is a non-techie blog. Which is fine, I guess, but I'm a fan of his techie thoughts. Occasionally his socio-political thoughts crept into his work, and it usually made him look like a nut, but I digress…"

Now, I gotta say, I don't think my skin is too thin. I don't really mind if you think I'm a nut, or CALL me a nut, but I think you should at least actually back up a statement like "made him look like a nut" with an example or two. So feel free to pop offer to my blog and offer some specifics!

Perhaps this is a reference to my fourth book (now out of print), Oracle PL/SQL Programming: Guide to Oracle8i Features, in which I decided to skip the usual "emp-dept" examples and use more interesting sources for my material, such as union busting, earth killing, war criminals, etc.

It created quite a stir for a while there. Some people really hated it, others enjoyed it immensely. Tim O'Reilly, the owner of O'Reilly Media, took a personal interest (I suppose that when a reader sends an email saying "I will never buy another O'Reilly book", he should take a personal interest). I thought he would give me a hard time and giving him some heartache, instead he invited me to write an article about why I did this. You can find my article and associated threads at:

http://www.oreilly.com/news/feuerstein_1000.html

Here's a bit from the beginning:

I Don't Like Your Examples!

by Steven Feuerstein
10/11/2000

I have been writing books about the Oracle PL/SQL programming language for the last five years. In 1999, O'Reilly published my fourth book, Oracle PL/SQL Programming Guide to Oracle8i Features, which created a bit of an uproar among my readership, caused considerable discussion within O'Reilly, and led to my writing this article.

Why did this book cause a sensation? Consider this excerpt from Chapter 2:

START BOOK EXCERPT

Let's look at a simple example. Suppose you are responsible for building a database to keep track of war criminals for the International Court of Justice. You create a package called wcpkg to keep track of alleged war criminals. One of the programs in the package registers a new criminal. You want that register program to always save its changes, even if the calling program hasn't yet issued a COMMIT. These characters are, after all, fairly slippery and you don't want them to get away.

The package specification holds no surprises; the transaction type is not evident here:

CREATE PACKAGE wcpkg AS
... PROCEDURE register (
culprit IN VARCHAR2, event IN VARCHAR2);
END wcpkg;
/

The package body, however, contains that new and wonderful pragma:

CREATE PACKAGE BODY wcpkg AS
...
PROCEDURE register (
culprit IN VARCHAR2, event IN VARCHAR2)
IS
PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION;
BEGIN
INSERT INTO war_criminal (name, activity)
VALUES (culprit, event);
COMMIT;
END;
END wcpkg;
/

And now when I call wcpkg.register, I am assured that my changes have been duly recorded:

BEGIN
wcpkg.register ('Kissinger', 'Secret Bombing of Cambodia');

END BOOK EXCERPT

Now, I expect it's not every day you pick up a technology text and read a charge that Henry Kissinger is a war criminal for the secret bombing of Cambodia.

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Is that nutty? I say that "nutty" is the world in which Kissinger is a respected elder statesman, raking in the big consulting bucks.