Some of Cringley's The Truth About IT Consultants is good stuff. His Type "A" and Type "C" are both stories of consultants who are brought in because they have specific skills. In the "A" case, it's a technical skill, and in the "C" case it's project management.
In both cases …
more ...Here's the analysis.
"60 cents of every IT dollar goes to maintaining existing systems". "This increased 'run the business' spending has consumed budget resources that were originally earmarked for more strategic and transformational investment," writes Gartner analyst Jed Rubin.
So, what happens with the "innovation" portion of the budget?
In …
more ...I've seen a couple of recent use case problems. The first recent failure of use cases was particularly alarming. It was a small application; a few use cases, a couple of actors.
One of the actors was labeled as "End User". Seriously. Few labels could be as vague as End …
more ...See the Electric Skateboard in XKCD. "You don't realize how much time you were spending on the boring parts until you don't have to do them anymore."
A helpful answer to "Why is Python so cool?" Fewer Boring Parts.
more ...Some reading:
Many, many thanks to readers who sent in comments, questions, suggestions and corrections.
I've updated Building Skills in Python to correct the errors found so far.
Also, in the process, I've revised chapter 36 a bit.
more ...Time Machine won't use a networked disk. The advertising and documentation is pretty clear that Time Machine wants USB or FireWire storage.
And this is Apple, it either works seamlessly, silently or automatically, or I've got the wrong use case. So …
Let's look at one failing business model: record sales. See Ars Technica for one summary: Legal music downloads soar as CD sales fall . That's news from 3 years ago. Look at Digital Media Wire's report from this year "Digital Music Download Sales to Pass CD Sales by 2012 ".
What does …
more ...Processing XML and X12 messages is a struggle. You have a number of use cases (I listed a bunch of features in Synchronicity and Document Object Models ). These can be tackled a number of ways.
What spoils me is the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM …
more ...Message-oriented applications involve an interface defined around messages (or documents). I've been working on applications that involve a fair amount of manipulation of XML and X12. Recently I started yet another, and started to recognize the essential design patterns.
There are four use cases. The first two use cases define …
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