We've got a fairly complex application that fits the "broker" pattern. It offers web services and it consumes web services. It does some complex calculations of it's own and it's got a pretty complex database.

One thing I like to have is a "ready for deployment" test suite that exercises …

Found this on a shelf in my office. The Apple 32 Developer's Handbook. It covers the Lisa 2, Lisa 2/5, Lisa 2/10 and the Macintosh. Apple described this family of machines as the SuperMicros.

It might be a collectable -- it's in pristine condition -- never used as a coaster …

The obvious answer is that we need a customer-like demo site that shows how the customer's software interacts with our software.

The problem is that it's a totally back-office kind of relationship. Worse, we don't have solid use cases. We have working software for some use cases, but every conference …

I found CSS Systems , in the Isotoma blog. Which lead me to CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS from Natalie Downe. That was a "aha!" moment. The problem is that I've been looking at incomplete, poorly-structured examples.

One problem I have with CSS and XPath is the multiple dimensions of …

After some processing by customers and us and vendors and god-alone-only-knows who else, our statistician has 4 zip files, each about 15Mb.

Step one is to look inside the zip archives and see what we have. Clearly, we can do this any of several ways. Looking manually doesn't get us …

See Did you ever switch from one programming language to another? A ridiculous question -- the answer is always "yes" unless you're a hobbyist.

See Programming Languages I've Learned In Order . See Programming Languages I've Learned (In Rough Order) Meme .

Here's my list.

High Scool - Early 70's

• IBM 1620 Assembler
• IBM …

I can't find the exact question -- it was something along the lines of "Why did you start with Python?" or "How did you choose Python?" It was probably one tagged with programming-languages .

For several days, I couldn't recall why or how I started looking at Python.

At first, all I …

This is a long, sordid story. Maybe a the title should be "Seduced by Technology", rather than "The Business Analyst Lied."

Initially, it sounded like this:

"Our customer asks for a recommendation regarding an offering. Based on the description of the offering, we use web services to get some scoring …

The point, from the FAQ is to answer programming questions with people who a trusted by their peers.

Go to the Python tag to join that conversation.

Your reputation is your overall score. Every time your question (or answer) is voted up, you get 10 reputation points. Each time you're …

There are two candidate locations on the file system for application components. What are the criteria for choosing among them?

The Python site-packages directory, IMO, is for packages that have two important criteria. First, they have to be widely reusable. Second, they have (or would benefit from) a setup.py …