There's this huge gulf between "protecting" our intellectual property (IP) and making money off our intellectual property. In our case, we have experts creating business models that we embody in some source code as business rules.

What's the IP? The software or the model? Where's the value? Is it out …

How do we provide some kind of admin support/tools/procedures for the sales team?

We know they'll invent new scenarios. We know they'll want to save that configuration. With Django's admin utilities, we can do a "dumpdata" that preserves the interesting parts of the the database. That much is …

The SD Times article (Python 3.0 won't be compatible... ) was very helpful -- crisp, to the point, management-friendly coverage. [For some additional thoughts, see the Python 3.0 and Language Evolution question on Stackoverflow.]

This applied to what we're building at work. Here's the best part. When I started on …

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 …