Ugh. When you try to parse MS-generated HTML, you find some extension syntax that is completely befuddling.

I've tried a few things in the past, none were particularly good.

In reading a file recently, I found that even Beautiful Soup was unable to prettify or parse it.

The document was …

The question of "Stored Procedures and Triggers" comes up fairly frequently.

Over the years (since the 90's, when stored procedures were introduced to Oracle) I've learned precisely how awful a mistake this technology is.

I've seen numerous problems that have stored procedures as their root cause. I'll identify just a …

Whitehouse.gov is publicly using open source tools.

See Boing Boing blog entry. Plus Huffington Post blog entry.

Most importantly, read this from O'Reilly.

Many places are using open source in stealth mode. Some even deny it. Ask your CIO what the policy on open source is, then check to …

Python's packages and modules are -- generally -- quite elegant.

They're relatively easy to manage. The __init__.py file (to make a module into a package) is very elegant. And stuff can be put into the __init__.py file to create a kind of top-level or header module in a larger package …

After all, programmers are all lazy and stupid.

Got his complaint recently.

"Developers on a fairly routine basis check in code into the wrong branch."

Followed by a common form of the lazy and stupid complaint. "Someone should think about which branch is used for what and when." Clearly "someone …

I had a recent conversation with some folks who were desperate to "processize" everything. They were asking about Scrum Master certification and what standards organizations define the "official" Scrum method.

Interestingly, I also saw a cool column in Better Software magazine, called "Scrumdamentalism" on the same basic question.

In my …

I find that some people spend way too much time doing "meta" programming. I prefer to use someone's framework rather than (a) write my own or (b) extend theirs. I prefer to learn their features (and quirks).

Having disclaimed an interest in meta programming, I do have to participate in …

I haven't written new C code since the turn of the millennium. Since then it's been almost all Java and Python. Along with Java and Python come JUnit and Python's unittest module.

I've grown completely dependent on unit testing.

I'm looking at some C code, and I want a unit …

Had a knock-down drag-out fight with another architect recently over "status" and "priority".

She claimed that the backlog priority and the status where the same thing. I claimed that you can easily have this.

Priority: 1, Status: Not Started

Priority: 2, Status: In Process

Priority: 3, Status: Completed

See? It's …

On StackOverflow you can read numerous questions on "flattening" nested lists in Python.

They all have a similar form.

"How do I flatten this list [ [ 1, 2, 3 ], [ 4, 5, 6 ], ... , [ 98, 99, 100 ] ]?"

The answers include list comprehensions, itertools, and other clever variants.

[STRIKEOUT:All] Much of which is …