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 …

Recently, I started on an architecture for which Fast CGI seemed like a good idea. But then, I couldn't find a pre-built YUM distro for Fedora Core 9 . Further, I couldn't really build my own, because I couldn't find the FC9 version of /usr/local/apache2.

Stuff moved. And no …

A Gentle Reader provided references to folks who are distrustful of prepared statements.

See "Prepared Statements, Musings " and "Prepared statements are dead, long live prepared statements ".

In "musings" we're told "...users do not clean up/close unused prepared statements." For this reason, they're bad, and should be avoided. Eventually, "...unless …

First, look at "Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL ". Okay, a longish article on the ins and outs of installing something that blah blah blah

Wait -- what? GreenSQL is a proxy for MySQL that checks the SQL for certain kinds of injection attacks!?!?!

Now read Twisted …

Here's a great quote from a reader regarding Big Plan for Change : "[the advice] doesn't account for project tracking requirements of the organization. Budgeting. Metrics. Hiring. Documenting. Transitioning to new staff."

Good point. Let's look at these in a little bit of depth. We'll cover the three management practices first …