After having written a number of application-specific object-relational mappers, I have been on the prowl for an elegant, enduring solution. I had started to come to grips with Django , and like much of the approach. Django has a tiny infrastructure feature (the settings.py file) which made it unpleasant to …

The Web Mart design pattern identifies three aspects to a piece of web content:

• The Core Concept - the "fact" that we will present.
• The Access Dimensions - objects that identify a concept or support navigation to the concept.
• The Details - objects that provide details in support of a concept.

There are …

There are three reasons, none of them terribly good in isolation.

1. I build business applications, not graphics applications, so the "basic" GTK was precisely what I needed.
2. PyCairo is (to me) a fairly recent innovation, and my GTK knowledge is a few years old.
3. Cairo requires a more complex technology …

Here's the shocking result.

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/08/language_quiz.php

And I thought I was just arrogant. Now I see that it's worse than I thought.

Python is a top-shelf toolset for creating sample data to do performance testing.

Let's say that you need to validate a data warehouse design, and you need a million facts that join with thousands of dimension entities across a half-dozen dimensions. You'll be generating data for seven different tables, and …

Mr. Hayes says that "...we’re afraid that programmers simply won’t use the hot new technology and that the money we spend on it will be wasted." He plays up this fear factor, providing lots of programmer-centric reasons: "Either programmers don’t use the tools at all, or they …

At this point, we have clex.py, which uses sqlpreproc.py to create a proper lexer for C source code. We use PLY 's ANSI C parser (cparse.py) as the backbone of our own analysis of C.

The C Language.

Separate from the lexical structure of C (the spelling …

The client said, "We have this program, largely in C, which we can no longer support. It doesn't really meet our business needs and it doesn't fit our technology skill set." As part of rewriting the requirements, the question of what it really did came up.

Actually, they had more …

There are a number of necessary skills for being an architect. Here's a list of four that occurred to me as I tried to piece together a coherent thought from a flurry of emails.

• Summarize.
• State A Goal.
• Know The Technology.
• Manage Your Investment In Learning.

These aren't sufficient skills …

A stored procedure isn't really very easy to understand. There's a profound fascination with triggers and stored procedures, and they're both really bad ideas. I can't say enough bad things about stored procedures. See PL/SQL vs. Java - Which is REALLY faster? and Over-Solving the Problem or When your architect …