Somewhere, I have a vague recollection of reading advice from someone (Bill Gates?) that it takes three versions to get things right. The context may have been a justification of the wild success of Windows 3.0.

Or, I could be just making it up.

But one thing I have …

"Request help w/ finding a reference or you can post a blog about how you can you have 2 oracle servers …

Check out this month's Hacker Monthly. One of my Stackoverflow answers was reswizzled into a short article on class design. That was gratifying.

The question of testing came up recently. The description of the process sounded like manually "testing" some complex web application. When trying to work out manual "testing", I find it necessary to use scare quotes. I'm not sure there's a place for "manual testing" of any software.

I know that …

This is the kind of little program that would be in HamCalc. But doesn't appear to be.

Looking at the Airfoil web page, specifically, this one: http://airfoiltools.com/airfoil/details?airfoil=ls013-il.

The measurements are all given in fractions of the depth of the airfoil. So you have to …

Just a safety note for folks who use a lot of electricity. In the winter, you might have computers and space heaters. Or you might (like me) live "off the grid". We use an inverter with a transfer relay to switch between battery power and grid power. Recently, we had …

Just stumbled across several blog postings on unit test naming.

Essentially the TestCase will name the fixture. That's pretty easy to understand.

The cool part is this: each test method is a two-part clause: condition_"should"_result or "when"_condition_"then"_result.

See https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Unit …

For those of us who live mostly off the grid, with inconsistent WiFi through hosts that flake out frequently, Apple's AppStore download protocol is absolutely infuriating. It's the most brittle damn protocol I've ever seen. When there's any disruption, it simply discards the data it has and starts again. How …

An excellent exposition of secure salted password hashing.

https://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm

This was really quite nice. It didn't have a Python version, but the clarity of the exposition makes the Python easy to write.

A few months back, I had this mystery conversation: {filename}/blog/2013/06/2013_06_27-password_encryption_short_answer_dont …

Finally upgraded to Python 3.3.3. The ordinary maintenance release fixed the problem with the previous release.

The previously documented patch ({filename}/blog/2013/10/2013_10_25-mac_os_x_109_mavericks_crashes_python_patch_available.rst) is no longer required.

Time to start incrementally installing all the various add-on components: docutils, PyYaml, Django, Jinja2, SQLAlchemy, etc.

Also, time …