First, there are several tiers of mutability in requirements. These tiers define typical levels of change context of the problem, the problem itself and the forces that select a solution to the problem.

1. Natural Laws (i.e., Gravity, Natural Selection). As well as metaphysical "laws" (i.e., reality). These don't …

See this story of King Cnut ruling the waves.

The King Cnut School of Management is management by fiat. Declaring it so.

PM: "When will this transition to production?"

Me: "After the firewall and VM configuration."

PM: "So, can we say Thursday?"

Me: "You can say that, if you want …

Here's a quote "standard issues associated w/ a disitributed db". And "There is the push versus pull of data. Say you use push and..." and more stuff after that.

First, by "Distributed Database", the question could mean almost anything. However, they provide the specific example of Oracle's Multi-Master Replication. That …

The ORM layer is magic, right?

The ORM layer "hides" the database, right?

We never have to think about persistence, right? It just magically "happens."

Wrong.

Here's some quotes from a recent email:

"Somehow people are surprised that we would have performance issues. Somehow people are surprised that now that …

Browsers are required to skip over bad HTML and render something.

Consequently, many web sites have significant HTML errors that don't show up until you try to scrape their content.

Beautiful Soup has a handy hook for doing markup massage prior to parsing. This is a way of fixing site-specific …

After installing Python 2.6 in Mac OS X, I had problems with BBEdit not finding the right version of Python. It kept running an old 2.5 version.

I finally tracked down the BBEdit documentation, http://pine.barebones.com/manual/BBEdit_9_User_Manual.pdf.

Found this: "BBEdit expects to find Python …

Ugh. When you try to parse MS-generated HTML, you find some extension syntax that is completely befuddling.

I've tried a few things in the past, none were particularly good.

In reading a file recently, I found that even Beautiful Soup was unable to prettify or parse it.

The document was …

The question of "Stored Procedures and Triggers" comes up fairly frequently.

Over the years (since the 90's, when stored procedures were introduced to Oracle) I've learned precisely how awful a mistake this technology is.

I've seen numerous problems that have stored procedures as their root cause. I'll identify just a …

Whitehouse.gov is publicly using open source tools.

See Boing Boing blog entry. Plus Huffington Post blog entry.

Most importantly, read this from O'Reilly.

Many places are using open source in stealth mode. Some even deny it. Ask your CIO what the policy on open source is, then check to …

Python's packages and modules are -- generally -- quite elegant.

They're relatively easy to manage. The __init__.py file (to make a module into a package) is very elegant. And stuff can be put into the __init__.py file to create a kind of top-level or header module in a larger package …