I can't say enough good things about ReStructuredText (RST). I've used all of the available markup languages (SGML, HTML and XML). They have their place, but they all fall short of being truly usable.
In This sounds complicated, because it is I reviewed some of my history of cheap content …
more ...Or so claims SD Times...
http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33430
The decision process includes: "find a low-cost solution". More importantly, it includes "justify the fees to purchase and for support."
This drives down the cost of software and support for commercial products. It also rationalizes what your buy when …
more ...The users want to locate people by last name. They want flexible matching. That's not very hard.
The DBA wants to do some wild-card searches efficiently. The DBA may not be responding to the users actual request, making this more complex than it needs to be.
I'm not in contact …
more ...I haven't done Applet stuff in years.
I do -- intensely -- like embedding functionality in web pages. RIA/Ajax and what-not are something I have trouble with because I'm not a graphic designer. Javascript and Applets fall into three clear categories:
For a while, I generated documentation with Cheetah. I wrote bodies as a fragment of HTML and used Cheetah to wrap those bodies in standard templates with navigation and branding. To write my books, I learned DocBook markup and used DocBook XSL tools to create HTML and PDF versions of …
more ...This is -- partially -- about the object-relational impedance mismatch.
But it's also about the parallel concepts between objects and relations. We'll use Python as our object model.
First, the obvious.
A SQL table is a list of rows. A row is a dictionary that maps a column name to a column …
more ...Check this out: “Why should I bother?”.
All organizations have an “Official Technology List”. I work “Enterprise IT”, where the official languages are limited to Java, VB .Net, C, C++. After that... well... it may as well be Esperanto or Whitespace.
PHP, for example, is near the top of the …
more ...About a year ago, we started out doing Python development with simple rst2htmldocuments for requirements, design, etc. In the code, we had comments that used epydoc with the epytextmarkup language.
No, it wasn’t confusing. Free-text documents (requirements, architecture, design, test plans, etc.) are easy and fun to …
more ...Learned about module globals the hard way.
The mod_wsgi daemon by default spawns 15 threads. This is important, but not obvious.
During load testing, we had intermittent weird errors. We were seeing an odd inconsistency in replies. My experience in creating military software in the ’80’s leads me to …
more ...iBlog doesn’t work well -- and hasn’t for a while.
I have iWeb as part of my iLife package -- and I use iLife heavily.
Perhaps it’s time to move.
There are some small “howevers” in that.