I got a bug report (back in April) about an exercise in Building Skills in Python. It was a change from 2.2 that I never validated in 2.5. Thanks to my readers for responding with questions and complaints.

I've finally updated and posted the revisions.

Further, after some …

Here's an amazing Stack Overflow question.

The follow-up conversation is great stuff.

The question shows two versions of approximately the same processing. Python is faster than Java. That's unexpected.

Java has static compilation and the hot-spot translation to machine code. Apparently, Python has some optimizations that are just as valuable …

A resume is a slippery thing -- a package of semi-structured data.

It has a kind of database-like feel to it, but there are so many exceptions and special cases that the database never works out quite the way you wanted.

For example, I've got -- essentially -- one employer over the past …

I can't say enough good things about ReStructuredText (RST). I've used all of the available markup languages (SGML, HTML and XML). They have their place, but they all fall short of being truly usable.

In This sounds complicated, because it is I reviewed some of my history of cheap content …

Or so claims SD Times...

http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33430

The decision process includes: "find a low-cost solution". More importantly, it includes "justify the fees to purchase and for support."

This drives down the cost of software and support for commercial products. It also rationalizes what your buy when …

The users want to locate people by last name. They want flexible matching. That's not very hard.

The DBA wants to do some wild-card searches efficiently. The DBA may not be responding to the users actual request, making this more complex than it needs to be.

I'm not in contact …

I haven't done Applet stuff in years.

I do -- intensely -- like embedding functionality in web pages. RIA/Ajax and what-not are something I have trouble with because I'm not a graphic designer. Javascript and Applets fall into three clear categories:

1. Basic usability. Javascript offers lots of little enhancements to HTML …

For a while, I generated documentation with Cheetah. I wrote bodies as a fragment of HTML and used Cheetah to wrap those bodies in standard templates with navigation and branding. To write my books, I learned DocBook markup and used DocBook XSL tools to create HTML and PDF versions of …

This is -- partially -- about the object-relational impedance mismatch.

But it's also about the parallel concepts between objects and relations. We'll use Python as our object model.

First, the obvious.

A SQL table is a list of rows. A row is a dictionary that maps a column name to a column …

Check this out: “Why should I bother?”.

All organizations have an “Official Technology List”. I work “Enterprise IT”, where the official languages are limited to Java, VB .Net, C, C++. After that... well... it may as well be Esperanto or Whitespace.

PHP, for example, is near the top of the …