Had a knock-down drag-out fight with another architect recently over "status" and "priority".
She claimed that the backlog priority and the status where the same thing. I claimed that you can easily have this.
Priority: 1, Status: Not Started
Priority: 2, Status: In Process
Priority: 3, Status: Completed
See? It's …
more ...On StackOverflow you can read numerous questions on "flattening" nested lists in Python.
They all have a similar form.
"How do I flatten this list [ [ 1, 2, 3 ], [ 4, 5, 6 ], ... , [ 98, 99, 100 ] ]?"
The answers include list comprehensions, itertools, and other clever variants.
[STRIKEOUT:All] Much of which is …
more ...This isn't computer forensics; it's something much simpler.
A colleague has been struck down with a disease (or won the lottery) and won't be back to work any time soon. Worse, they did not use SVN to do daily check-ins. Their laptop has the latest and greatest. As well as …
more ...Many folks ask about Agile project planning and total cost. As our internal project managers wrestle with this, there are a lot of questions.
Mostly these questions are rejections of incremental delivery ("All or Nothing") or rejections of flexibility ("Total Total Cost"). We'll look at these rejections in detail.
Traditional …
more ...Got this question recently.
"Any suggestions on PM tools that meet the following considerations
- Planning
- Estimating
- Tracking (allowing both PM input and developer input)
- Reporting
- Support both Agile and Waterfall projects
- Releases
- Bug fixes (probably just another type of backlog)"
Agile PM requires far less planning than you're used to …
more ...See Joel On Software: The Duct Tape Programmer: he lauds the programmer who gets stuff done with "duct tape and WD-40".
Here's why: "Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."
Dave Drake sent the link along with the following:
This "speaks of coding for …
more ...The USPS ZIP codes have a multi-part structure. The first three digits are a prefix that defines a sectional center facility.
The USPS table L005 3-Digit ZIP Code Prefix Groups—SCF Sortation maps clusters of ZIP3 prefixes to Facility and State codes. The following URL has this table.
A co-worker has mistakenly cloned a directory tree rather than link to it. Then they made some number of changes to files in that directory.
Your job is to compute a directory-level difference between an official copy and the changes they made. Sadly, you can't trivially …
Good stuff in ComputerWorld: Partnerships can Go Too Far.
"Consider vendor innovation. As companies become large and entrenched, they typically become more risk-averse and less creative, often rejecting ideas that challenge conventional wisdom."
This is really only half the story.
Programming is hard -- really hard. Read EWD …
Upgraded a VM to Fedora 11 recently.
This -- it turns out -- comes with Python 2.6 installed.
It is, however, an incomplete build. To do anything, I had to install a some additional Python packages. Specifically, the "libraries and header files needed for Python development". Also, IIRC, the tkinter package …
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