See this: "Stop hard-coding business rules" in SD Times. Here's what's exasperating: "Memo to developers: Stop hard-coding business rules into applications. Use business rules engines instead." Business Rules Engines? You mean Python? It appears that they don't mean Python. "Developers can use [a BPM suite or rules engine] and be …

Computerworld, September 12, page 10.

MicroburstIT Disasters According to a study of 1,471 big IT projects, 15% turn out to be money pits, with cost overruns averaging 200%.

How is this a politically-charged statement? We hear this kind of thing all the time.

As developers (or project leaders …

"Threads don't promote concurrent I/O."

Kernel threads may. Most of us write user threads. Here's a great summary under Thread (Computer Science).

However, the use of blocking system calls in user threads (as opposed to kernel threads) or fibers can be problematic. If a user thread or a fiber …

Folks like to claim that unit testing absolutely requires each class be tested in isolation using mocks for all dependencies. This is a noble aspiration, but doesn't work out perfectly well in Python.

First, "unit" is intentionally vague. It could be a class, a function, a module or a package …

web2py wins an award -- cool. I really like Django. But...

"Are you implying that a scalable Data Warehouse solution could be implemented using Python and serialised files?"

Not "implying". I'm trying to state it as clearly as I can. A scalable data warehouse solution involves a lot of flat file processing.

ETL, for example, is mostly a flat-file pipeline. It …

We process a fair amount of externally-prepared datasets. 40,000 rows of econometric data that we purchased from a third-party. Mostly, the data is in a usable format: .CSV or .XSLX.

Once in a while, we get CSV with |. A few times, we got fixed-format COBOL-style records.

Recently, we got …

Check out this question on Stack Overflow: "Python: replace a string by a float in txt file".

The question is confusing, but it appears to be a longish and confused description of simple formatting or template substitution. It's hard to be sure, but it sounds like one of Those Things …

I don't want the spamilicious email. I'm trying to actually unsubscribe. The footer says "If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of any information contained in or attached to this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message …

Wednesday night. At 757 Labs. Be there. Here's the details on meetup.com Lacking any other agenda, I'll do some more presentation on the supreme coolness of Django.