I found this note while cleaning up. I think it's a summary of John Cleese's short movie "Meetings Bloody Meetings".

1. Plan. Why are we meeting? What's the purpose? What are the subjects?
2. Inform. Tell the attendees what, why and the expected outcome.
3. Prepare. Create an agenda, with a time line …

I wrote the first Building Skills books using Appleworks. It wasn't too bad to organize the styles around basic semantics of the subject area. It's an easy, productive writing environment. Except, of course, for internal cross-references, indexes, and tables of contents.

I converted to DocBook XML markup. The conversion was …

Code Dojo, to an extent, includes a fair amount of OO Design.

I've been pondering ways to help folks who clearly have no design skills at all. I've read their code. It's appalling.

Toward that end, I looked at some of the Code Kata links: the CodeKata page, Mark Needham's …

The E. W. Dijkstra Archive is a collection of over 1,000 manuscripts that EWD sent around during his career.

This Stack Overflow question ("explaining software development to management") had a really brilliant comment on one of the answers.

Analogies are always leaky, and you will end up with proposed …

My son's a musician, and one of the standard jokes boils down to the phrase "no brown M&M's". They use it as a catch-all phrase for people being fussy to a level that's senseless.

Then BoingBoing pointed me to the Van Halen Brown M&M story in snopes.com …

Some assumptions are really hard to identify as "assumptions". Some assumptions are more "wishful thinking" than "assumption".

We process a lot of spreadsheets. As far as I'm concerned, the Spreadsheet User Interface (SUI) is a first-class part of any application. Users understand them, and you don't have to code as …

Check out this list of questions from Stack Overflow: [Django] join.

These are all folks trying to do joins or outer joins even though they have objects fetched through the ORM.

How does this confusion arise? Easy. Folks work with SQL as if the relational world-view is Important and Universal …

I used to rely on the TIOBE Software Programming Community Index.

Today, I learned about the langpop site. The context was following an SD Times blog posting on Haskell. But I got distracted looking at language rankings and what it means to consulting companies.

[Until corrected, I was] particularly drawn …

Searched for this the other day. Came up empty. Clearly, didn't search hard enough.

Automatically Generated Python Code from an UML diagram? So far, there are three separate answers listing a total of five separate products.

I really want to annotate the UML with docstrings. If that was supported, it …

See Massachusetts Says Encrypt It All!

This gives a hint as to the future of personal information collection and dissemination.

This is potentially A Bad Thing.

I don't see a problem with using SSL to encrypt "over the wire" data transfers. I don't see a problem with adding layers of …