This is a fair-to-partly silly question that shows up on places like StackOverflow once in a while.

Python is used widely and pretty heavily.

It's a built-in feature to many operating systems in common use. The exception, of course, is Windows.

I just found out -- the hard way -- that Python …

Check this out: "IT Is Too Darn Slow".

This article is packed with helpful advice on how to improve "velocity" and the pace of innovation.

Good quotes: "Once IT decides to focus on speed, two obstacles get in the way: security and governance." This is important. Manage security without it …

Here's a lack of a use case for you.

Someone -- fraudulently -- used my email address to subscribe to XBox live. I cannot remedy this. Apparently, neither can Microsoft.

I get spam from XBox. I change my passwords all over the place.

I go to the XBox live web site to …

A quote

"What sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense."

—Napoleon Bonaparte

There's no authoritative source for this quote. Since Fulton was commissioned to …

Check out this little item in eWeek. "Transforming DIY Projects from the Painful to the Productive".

As an outside consultant in a large number of organizations, I've seen a lot of DIY projects—what we used to call "end user computing". Indeed, I've even been hired by the user organizations …

We're struggling with our Relational Schema. We're not alone, of course, everyone struggles with the relational model. The technology imposes difficult limitations and we work around them.

There's kind of a 4-step process through which the relational schema erodes into irrelevance. The concept of a schema is not irrelevant. It's …

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor: "Then don't do that."

I got an email with hundreds of words of content. This part made sense: "...doing wild card searches using Oracle's database engine and are wondering why is it so slow and how do they make it …

Looked interesting enough for someone to email it to me. Still can't figure out why they sent it. Posting this feels like advertising, so perhaps I should charge them a promotional fee.

I have slowly grown to love RESTful web services.

I was asked about a nearly empty section in the code repository labeled "Java client".

"Yes," I said, "it's a place-holder for a Java package that includes classes to wrap our RESTful web services."

"Really?" I was asked, "Why? We use …

Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially impossible to answer. And yet, the question persists.

There are three rules for figuring out which is …