The obvious answer is that we need a customer-like demo site that shows how the customer's software interacts with our software.

The problem is that it's a totally back-office kind of relationship. Worse, we don't have solid use cases. We have working software for some use cases, but every conference …

I found CSS Systems , in the Isotoma blog. Which lead me to CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS from Natalie Downe. That was a "aha!" moment. The problem is that I've been looking at incomplete, poorly-structured examples.

One problem I have with CSS and XPath is the multiple dimensions of …

After some processing by customers and us and vendors and god-alone-only-knows who else, our statistician has 4 zip files, each about 15Mb.

Step one is to look inside the zip archives and see what we have. Clearly, we can do this any of several ways. Looking manually doesn't get us …

This is a long, sordid story. Maybe a the title should be "Seduced by Technology", rather than "The Business Analyst Lied."

Initially, it sounded like this:

"Our customer asks for a recommendation regarding an offering. Based on the description of the offering, we use web services to get some scoring …

There are two candidate locations on the file system for application components. What are the criteria for choosing among them?

The Python site-packages directory, IMO, is for packages that have two important criteria. First, they have to be widely reusable. Second, they have (or would benefit from) a setup.py …

A Gentle Reader provided references to folks who are distrustful of prepared statements.

See "Prepared Statements, Musings " and "Prepared statements are dead, long live prepared statements ".

In "musings" we're told "...users do not clean up/close unused prepared statements." For this reason, they're bad, and should be avoided. Eventually, "...unless …

First, look at "Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL ". Okay, a longish article on the ins and outs of installing something that blah blah blah

Wait -- what? GreenSQL is a proxy for MySQL that checks the SQL for certain kinds of injection attacks!?!?!

Now read Twisted …

Here's a great quote from a reader regarding Big Plan for Change : "[the advice] doesn't account for project tracking requirements of the organization. Budgeting. Metrics. Hiring. Documenting. Transitioning to new staff."

Good point. Let's look at these in a little bit of depth. We'll cover the three management practices first …

See Fast, but Slowly . ComputerWorld, Frankly Speaking, August 25, 2008, by Frank Hayes.

This is a very cool restatement of some essential Agile principles.

Sure, we can train and plan -- and we should. But there are too many unknowns to train and plan for everything. A slow ramp-up lets us …

Here's a recipe for transforming a pile of similarly-formatted source spreadsheets into a suite of unittest test cases.