My son's a musician, and one of the standard jokes boils down to the phrase "no brown M&M's". They use it as a catch-all phrase for people being fussy to a level that's senseless.

Then BoingBoing pointed me to the Van Halen Brown M&M story in snopes.com …

Some assumptions are really hard to identify as "assumptions". Some assumptions are more "wishful thinking" than "assumption".

We process a lot of spreadsheets. As far as I'm concerned, the Spreadsheet User Interface (SUI) is a first-class part of any application. Users understand them, and you don't have to code as …

Check out this list of questions from Stack Overflow: [Django] join.

These are all folks trying to do joins or outer joins even though they have objects fetched through the ORM.

How does this confusion arise? Easy. Folks work with SQL as if the relational world-view is Important and Universal …

I used to rely on the TIOBE Software Programming Community Index.

Today, I learned about the langpop site. The context was following an SD Times blog posting on Haskell. But I got distracted looking at language rankings and what it means to consulting companies.

[Until corrected, I was] particularly drawn …

Searched for this the other day. Came up empty. Clearly, didn't search hard enough.

Automatically Generated Python Code from an UML diagram? So far, there are three separate answers listing a total of five separate products.

I really want to annotate the UML with docstrings. If that was supported, it …

See Massachusetts Says Encrypt It All!

This gives a hint as to the future of personal information collection and dissemination.

This is potentially A Bad Thing.

I don't see a problem with using SSL to encrypt "over the wire" data transfers. I don't see a problem with adding layers of …

Yesterday, I looked at some marketing material on SPI (Software Process Improvement). It was quite good. The approach was very pragmatic, the deliverables very sound.

The hard part is connecting with customers.

I've only worked with a few customers who were actually interested in process improvement. I've worked with close …

Quite a while ago, I compared Java and PL/SQL to gauge their relative performance.

Recently (okay, back in mid-June) I got this request.

One thing I would like to compare is Java vs PL/SQL using native compilation (search Oracle for NCOMP). Would you be willing to repeat your …

See Python XML parsing and Parsing simple XML files in python using etree.

Originally, I used SAX -- but built DOM objects with it. I moved from application-specific DOM's to generic DOM's.

Then I switched to the miniDOM parser. It gave me structures I could walk with a pleasant Visitor design …

Saw a horrifying design document recently. One that was at the "gouge out my eyes" level of badness. That's one step below "drink until I forget what I saw", but one level above "beat the author with a tire iron."

They were -- I'm guessing here -- trying to develop their own …