Background.

The suggested environment for learning to program using graphics instead of text was LiveWires . This includes a curriculum and associated product, making it a tidy package.

There are a number of alternatives, however.

• Python includes tkinter , section 20.1 of the Python Library Reference, v2.5.
• Python includes turtle …

Physical Tuning.

"...databases can be tuned by creating appropriate indexes, removing others, modifying the physical database schema to suit the most common types of queries, etc. So it isn't clear whether the PL/SQL figure could be better if the database was optimised by a good DBA."

While a good …

While the question of speed came up recently, it ties in to a long-standing position of mine. I ran some realistic benchmarks, and I'm much happier with my architecture now.

Background.

Years ago, at a Siebel conference, I heard a heretical comment. Specifically, they use the RDBMS as simple, flat …

Some additional Sugar notes recently appeared in "Plumbing Life's Depths ".

After attending PyCon, I polished up my GTK environment, reloading the current releases. Here's what I did to get a workable PyGTK on my various desktops.

The GTK Technology Stack

Here's an overview of the components of this stack:

1. GLIB …

Here are some useful quotes:

• Andrew’s first law of career spotting: Accountants are people who, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use [A spreadsheet]”. Now they have two problems.
• [A spreadsheet] is a great prototyping tool, just don’t let it anywhere near your production …

If we look at a spreadsheet as a document we can develop a parser that locates the user-supplied information in that document. Like any language, we'll have to treat some elements of the spreadsheet as pure syntax, little more than punctuation. In the case of embedded formulas, these are elaborate …

See "When a Column is Not a Column " for a rant on failed attempts to scale spreadsheets up into relational databases. Bottom Line: A spreadsheet column is rarely an RDBMS column. Often the SS column's label is a key value, just like the SS row's label, and the cell's value …

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 …

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 …