December 11th, the electric power went out here in the northeast, and stayed out until late on the 14th.

We have gas heat, gas cooking. But the furnace wouldn't run without AC power. So, I now have a favorite electrical appliance -- the blower on my furnace.:Apple-tab-span:``

Here's my strategy …

See Configuration Options in Code or INI Files? . Also, see Python as Configuration Language .

Here's some of the argument.

• Editing. Which is easier? Which is more expressive? Some say that Text (INI format especially) is easier -- but I don't see what. Python is just as easy as INI, and has …

Check out this StackOverflow "question": Does anyone have metrics on the utility of formal Unit Testing? . While -- technically -- it does have a question, it's more of a rant against formal unit testing than a proper question.

Here's the conflation comment. "I've worked with developers who never caught any errors in …

See this question on Python objects deleting themselves . There was some fundamental confusion about objects, deletion and garbage collection.

Some additional material was posted in an answer (not in the question, where it belongs) making it a little hard to go from question to answers. The original poster's non-answer had …

There's this huge gulf between "protecting" our intellectual property (IP) and making money off our intellectual property. In our case, we have experts creating business models that we embody in some source code as business rules.

What's the IP? The software or the model? Where's the value? Is it out …

How do we provide some kind of admin support/tools/procedures for the sales team?

We know they'll invent new scenarios. We know they'll want to save that configuration. With Django's admin utilities, we can do a "dumpdata" that preserves the interesting parts of the the database. That much is …

We've got a fairly complex application that fits the "broker" pattern. It offers web services and it consumes web services. It does some complex calculations of it's own and it's got a pretty complex database.

One thing I like to have is a "ready for deployment" test suite that exercises …

The obvious answer is that we need a customer-like demo site that shows how the customer's software interacts with our software.

The problem is that it's a totally back-office kind of relationship. Worse, we don't have solid use cases. We have working software for some use cases, but every conference …

I found CSS Systems , in the Isotoma blog. Which lead me to CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS from Natalie Downe. That was a "aha!" moment. The problem is that I've been looking at incomplete, poorly-structured examples.

One problem I have with CSS and XPath is the multiple dimensions of …

After some processing by customers and us and vendors and god-alone-only-knows who else, our statistician has 4 zip files, each about 15Mb.

Step one is to look inside the zip archives and see what we have. Clearly, we can do this any of several ways. Looking manually doesn't get us …