See Andrew Binstock's "Windows 8: Microsoft's Development Re-Do".

The costs of these migrations has been enormous and continues to accumulate...

I can only rub my hands with glee and engage in shameless "I Told You So" self-congratulations.

Only you can prevent being held hostage by Microsoft.

More than once, I've …

I really dislike being asked to plan a project. It's hard to predict the future accurately.

In spite of the future being -- well -- the future, and utterly unknowable, we still have to have the following kinds of discussions.

Me: "It's probably going to take a team of six."

Customer: "We …

A recent question.

i came up with two options.

1. building skills 1 (+ other references)... then algorithms & data structures.... then your books 2 & 3

or

2. your three books 1,2 & 3... then algo & ds kindly help me decide so i can start soon.

I have two pieces of advice …

Emphasis on the "More On" as in "Moron". This is a standard design error story. The issue is that inheritance happens along an "axis" or "dimension" where the subclasses are at different points along that axis. Multi-dimensional inheritance is an EPIC FAIL.

The topic of VMware came up at my local 757 Python Users Group.

A common administrative need is to control VM farms. While there are a number of pointy-clicky GUI tools, VMware offers the VIX library to permit writing scripts to control VM's.

Here's some information we looked at recently …

Received

"it seems that software development has caught the agile religion. Personally, I have an issue w/ being unimodal."

What?

First. "agile religion". As in the deprecating statement: Agile is nothing more than a religion? As in Agile is nothing more than a vague religious practice with no tangible value …

In Command-Line Applications, we looked at a Python main-import switch which boiled down to this.

for file in args.file:
    with open( file, "r" ) as source:
        process_file( source, args )

The point was that each distinct file on the command-line was processed in a more-or-less uniform way by a single function …

It occurs to me that much of "Big IT" creates a well-oiled organization that makes broken software seem acceptable. The breakage is wrapped in layers of finely-tuned process. Consider a typical Enterprise Application. There's a help desk, ticket tracking, a user support organization that does "ad-hoc" processing, and a development …

I'm old -- I admit it -- and I feel that command-line applications are still very, very important. Linux, for example, is packed full of almost innumerable command-line applications. In some cases, the Linux GUI tools are specifically just wrappers around the underlying command-line applications.

For many types of high-volume data processing …

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 …