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 …

About a year ago, we started out doing Python development with simple rst2htmldocuments for requirements, design, etc. In the code, we had comments that used epydoc with the epytextmarkup language.

No, it wasn’t confusing. Free-text documents (requirements, architecture, design, test plans, etc.) are easy and fun to …

Learned about module globals the hard way.

The mod_wsgi daemon by default spawns 15 threads. This is important, but not obvious.

During load testing, we had intermittent weird errors. We were seeing an odd inconsistency in replies. My experience in creating military software in the ’80’s leads me to …

iBlog doesn’t work well -- and hasn’t for a while.

I have iWeb as part of my iLife package -- and I use iLife heavily.

Perhaps it’s time to move.

There are some small “howevers” in that.

• 344 blog entires that I’d like to migrate to iWeb. It …

For techincal blogging (like this) iWeb is weak.

The total MacOSX integration -- pictures, podcast, etc. -- is nice. It's very cool for my travelogues. But for code samples and the kind of customized HTML widgets that are required by Technorati, it's too hard to deal with.

The size of the iWeb …

Last week I noticed that some contacts were repeated in my iPhone contacts. That's awful. It makes the phone suddenly very hard to use.

I did a little reading, found some stuff about various levels of synchronization. I have a Mac OS X 10.4, plus 10.5, plus the …

In previous years, I had several email lists: my Yahoo! list, my Google list, my desktop. To figure out what to send, I had to merge the lists, which meant reading vCards, and CSV files. This is totally the sweet-spot for Python.

The Mac OS X Mobile Me has a …

Check out Carol Johnson's book The Language of Work: Technical Communication at Lukens Steel, 1810 to 1925 . It puts technical writing in a bigger perspective.

The cool thing is dragging meaning out of a corpus of documents.

No one wants to be Rickrolled. I suppose it could have been funny, once, for about 15 minutes. I didn't think it was all that funny to begin with, but there it is -- a part of the lexicon. However, it remains obscure, and sometimes hard to explain to non-technical folks …

I'm not a fan of XML as the one true language. I've griped before about the attractive nuisance of XML.

Recently, I saw Sean McGrath's New Realities , which lead me to Project Zero , a RESTful/JSONic SOA architecture. Their blog includes postings like A run-time for "the New Reality .

I …