... don't screw up cutting and pasting and the "/" vs "\" depending on unix / windows.

• No fire in the server room.
• No anthrax outbreak.
• No Zombie apocalypse …

Also see "On Risk and Estimating and Agile Methods". This post is yet another angle on a common theme.

Appleworks (formerly Clarisworks) is software that's been dead meat since 2007.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks#End_of_Appleworks

Which is fine unless you have an old computer with old applications that still works. For example, a 2002-vintage iMac G4 http://www.imachistory.com/2002/ still works. Slowly.

When someone …

It may be helpful to look back at 'How Managers Say "No"' which is about breaking the RDBMS Hegemony.

I got an email in which the simple concepts of "data manipulation" and "persistence" had become entangled with SQL DML to a degree that the conversation failed to make sense to …

Got an email looking for help in attempting break through the RDBMS Hegemony. It's a little confusing, but this is the important part of how management says "no".

"Their response was nice but can you flush [sic] it out more"

[First: the word is "flesh": "flesh it out." Repeat after …

The HamCalc program binhop is one of those little nuggets of beauty that might be helpful or might be useless. Or. Perhaps there's some useful stuff commingled with quirky stuff.

For folks in agriculture or manufacturing, I'm hoping that the calculation could be helpful. Although it's also likely that folks …

A recent question

"what we might expect, in terms of 1) Time to completion, 2) Cost to implement according to the mockup, 3) Monthly server/maintenance costs and 4) approximate team size required"

This question was followed by this acknowledgement:

"it is hard to make the above estimations, given the …

See The Question of Risk.

Also, see Lean Projects -- Not Deficient Projects.

And Keeping the Customer Satisfied.

These are notes for a long, detailed rant on the value of Agile methods.

One specious argument against an Agile approach is the "risk management" question. In this case, however, it becomes a …

A library had unit tests that ran for almost 600 seconds. Two small changes dropped the run time to 26 seconds.

I was amazed.

Step 1. I turned on the cProfile. I added two methods to the slowest unit test module.

def profile():
    import cProfile
    cProfile.run( 'main()', 'the_slow_module.prof' …

I get emails looking for help with technology choice. Essentially: "I've got this idea for game-changing software idea, what technology should I use?" These questions have disturbing expectations. There's a Gordian Knot of dependencies that's sometimes baffling.

Sometimes the questions are about choosing a "tech stack" or an "architecture". Sometimes …