Here's what I observed.

Customer: "Our business performance isn't what we want. We think some of our intranet is no good."

Us: "We'd love to look at it."

Customer: "Not so fast. You can't 'look at it'. You have to propose a measurable change in business performance, define a fixed …

To begin with, we're talking about the implementation's source code. Here's the situation: Ann says that Bob's code is no good, and she's provided an alternative implementation. How do we choose?

The first part of any scorecard is the SEI Quality Measures Taxonomy . It's marked "Legacy", but I haven't seen …

While there are lame reasons for using XML, there are good reasons also. The good reasons, however, aren't delightfully clear. They seem to be clouded by the lame issues. I'm trying to sort out the best and most logical reasons for using XML.

Here are 8 typically lame reasons for …

I read "Stamp on the ants ", which lead me to write "XML - One Ring to Rule them All... " because I'd seem some remarkably lame justification for XML. I saw an interesting response in "XML is first class, scripting languages are second class ".

At this point, we have an interesting tangential …

I harp on Design Goal 6 in the XML 1.0 Standard , "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear". In Kontrawize, the response is XML editors help meet this design goal. "There are plenty of good XML-aware editors around, some of which are free." While true, I think this …

The XML folks seem to have a number of points:

• Ant already works. Complexity be damned.
• XML is fine for everything that's not Java. Except SQL. And CSS.
• Ant is "already" part of the technology stack, and it uses XML. Anything better isn't already there.
• Everyone already knows XML. They …

The points are serious issues. However, the best summary comes from Karl Guertin: "My explanation is that Duck Typing is like Ethernet, in theory it will break, but in practice it works pretty well."

There were three questions which raised four issues. The questions included the seemingly incomplete OO implementation …

This is an important topic. I've blogged on the layers issue before ("Layers, Interfaces and Mutabilty "), and this AJAX issue is a great additional point.

With depressing regularity I also hear the complementary "stored procedure" question. This question takes a number of different forms, but they all mean the same …

I'm very excited to be giving a presentation at PyCon '07. A 30-minute slot is tough because the Star Schema can be confusing. The coding is pretty transparent (IMO), but the background for why I had to do this and places where it can be used are more interesting than …

In the CW article, pseudonymous Mathias Thurman describes a demonstration of Microsoft's Rights Management Services product. The audience of executives identify a number of "Suppose..." scenarios, which the author dismisses as merely research subjects, concluding that "...the goal of this proof of concept was to introduce a group of executives …