Yesterday, I looked at some marketing material on SPI (Software Process Improvement). It was quite good. The approach was very pragmatic, the deliverables very sound.

The hard part is connecting with customers.

I've only worked with a few customers who were actually interested in process improvement. I've worked with close …

Quite a while ago, I compared Java and PL/SQL to gauge their relative performance.

Recently (okay, back in mid-June) I got this request.

One thing I would like to compare is Java vs PL/SQL using native compilation (search Oracle for NCOMP). Would you be willing to repeat your …

See Python XML parsing and Parsing simple XML files in python using etree.

Originally, I used SAX -- but built DOM objects with it. I moved from application-specific DOM's to generic DOM's.

Then I switched to the miniDOM parser. It gave me structures I could walk with a pleasant Visitor design …

Saw a horrifying design document recently. One that was at the "gouge out my eyes" level of badness. That's one step below "drink until I forget what I saw", but one level above "beat the author with a tire iron."

They were -- I'm guessing here -- trying to develop their own …

The old code was 5700 lines of bad VB. The new code is Velocity, Flying Saucer, iText and 120 lines of glue. The old code will be replaced with perhaps 500 lines of XHTML-producing Velocity templates.

[The Flying Saucer site -- with the main menu on the right -- was confusing at …

Context: We're reverse engineering some bad VB application code.

What I saw. "This problem report pushed this module over the 64k limit for modules. Therefore all code used for XYZ has been removed from this module and placed in the new bas module XYZ."

What I learned. Good design -- irrelevant …

I've done a fair amount of reverse engineering over the years.

In the early days, you went from code to specification to new code. It took forever and the problems you uncovered -- well -- they often derailed the project.

Recently, I used a TDD-like approach. Each piece of legacy code was …

Apple's Time Capsule rocks.

For a while the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) -- with a disk added -- would do the same thing. You got Time Capsule backups seamlessly and continuously.

No more. Version 7.4.2. fixed the "bug". Now the AEBS no longer backs up to a disk.

They've …

I have very mixed feelings about XML's usability.

An avowed goal of the inventors of XML was "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear." While I like to think that "legible" means usable, I'm feeling that legibility is really a minimal standard; I think it's a polite way of …

I've cataloged a third specific case of fundamental failures to understand polymorphism. The first two I've seen a fair number of times. The third seems to be more rare.

1. "How do I determine which subclass an object has?" The Identification problem.

2. "How do I morph an object to …