PyCon Presentation

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 …

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Siren's Call of DRM

Date Tags web / cms

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 …

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Layers, Interfaces and Mutability

Here's the full, minimally-edited question:

"We are having a debate about the basic way the UI, Business Logic, and Data Access layers communicate.

My experience has been that the UI talks to the BizLogic, and the BizLogic maps between itself and the Data Access layer.. like this:

::
UI -> BizLogic -> Data …
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Refactoring and Unit Testing

I do a fair amount of manual refactoring. I've used WebSphere Studio (Eclipse) to do some automated refactoring, so I have some experience in using IDE's which exploit Java's static type-checking.

However, the question of type checking in a dynamic language is interesting. I don't use a sophisticated IDE for …

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More of the Open Source Value Proposition

Binstock does a quick compare and contrast between Ruby and NetRexx, showing how an active community promoted Ruby, and NetRexx's lack of a community left it languishing. I think that this analysis is only partly true, and misses part of the value of open source.

Specifically, IBM's proprietary NetRexx can't …

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