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 …

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 …

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.

• 344 blog entires that I’d like to migrate to iWeb. It …

For techincal blogging (like this) iWeb is weak.

The total MacOSX integration -- pictures, podcast, etc. -- is nice. It's very cool for my travelogues. But for code samples and the kind of customized HTML widgets that are required by Technorati, it's too hard to deal with.

The size of the iWeb …

Unit test coverage is a politically sensitive issue.

If you don't like (or want) unit testing, you set the threshold really high. 100% code coverage, or worse, 100% logic path coverage. Since these goals are difficult to achieve, the whole unit testing business can be made to go away.

If …

On Stack Overflow I was captivated by "What tools would you used to write a modular database in Python? " and "Implementing a 'rules engine' in Python ".

Both questions are quite amazing because they already have a modular, flexible rules engine (called "python") but it's not good enough: they want to …

The Windows and .NET watch column, February 1, was Python: arbitrarily interesting . For certain classes of "interesting" problems, where interesting is defined arbitrarily, Python is an easy way to tackle those interesting problems.

It picks out a few specific areas of IronPython application, which is good and bad. Good because …

See the 10 Open Source Opportunities entry in CIO Minute.

The OS and Virtualization territory is already staked out. Not sure this will be a real opportunity space.

Enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, BI) are scary. Scary because these are purchased by CIO's. CIO's are herd animals and -- of course -- an …

The disruption from Microsoft's failures are only starting to be felt. Check out Frank Hayes' "The Pain Begins " column in the January 26th Computer World.

Corporate IT stubbed Vista. What will it do with Windows 7? And what's the fall-back plan if Windows 7 is bust and Microsoft does an …

Check out Binstock's January 15th column in Software Development Times, Integration Watch: The End of PERL?

Very compelling case, generally free of the kind of subjective rants that often characterize analysis of PERL's viability. I tell people to drop PERL all the time, but I don't often have as clear …