A joyous milestone today. Removed much of our pre-Piston RESTful web services code.

We started with the Django-REST Interface. While nice, it imposed a number of restrictions that were onerous. In particular, we have a lot of non-model responses. They're model-like data that we serialize to be compatible with …

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 …