The problem is this: parsing HTML from a variety of sources to create pleasant, easy-to-manipulate spreadsheets. HTML can represent the same data in a variety of ways, even within a single web site. What we have are several layers of parsing; layers which must be linked with increasingly simplified intermediate …

Let's talk about parallel processing, something I prefer to call concurrent processing. It shows up in many places. Most OS's have concurrent processes. Applications like Apache have concurrent threads within a process for handling web requests. Oracle not only handles concurrent queries from multiple users, but you can define a …

The star schema represents data as a table of facts (measurable values) that are associated with the various dimensions of the fact. Common dimensions include time, geography, organization, product and the like. I'm working with some folks whose facts are a bunch of medical test results, and the dimensions are …

NUT. No Unit Test Cases. Need I say more? If there are not unit tests, this isn't real programming.

MCF and NCF. Minimal/No Use of Collections Framework. The MCF defect occurs when someone uses only the Array or Vector classes. The NCF defect occurs when someone uses only primitive …

It's not that spreadsheets are evil incarnate, it's just that there are so many ways to abuse them. Spreadsheets put a veneer of structure over some information. Bad spreadsheet design, worse yet, puts unstructured information into a hard-to-manipulate format.

I've complained about this before. See Great Quotes about the Spreadsheet …

Message-oriented applications involve an interface defined around messages (or documents). I've been working on applications that involve a fair amount of manipulation of XML and X12. Recently I started yet another, and started to recognize the essential design patterns.

There are four use cases. The first two use cases define …

Some recent thoughts on using Python, directly, as configuration file syntax. In a way, a configuration is a highly-specialized Domain Specific Language focused on the application's problem domain. The point is to leverage syntax we already have to create meaningful configuration files.

"Python is sometimes a good use for a …

I have to say this first -- just because ERwin calls it "physical" that doesn't mean anything. ERwin uses "physical" model to mean "product-specific logical" model. They use "logical" to mean "product-independent logical" model.

ERwin doesn't do physical modeling. Not even a little bit. The physical layer of a relational database …

Time is simple. You can make it complicated with any one of a large number of dumb-as-dirt decisions.

In the Real World™, time may be a quantum field (read stuff by 't Hooft ). For that matter, space itself may have some quantum granularity. Or, this could be a handy hack …

There aren't too many variations on the open-ended date range problem. We have a table of events or rules or policies that have start dates. Some have end dates, because they've been replaced or superseded. Others don't have end-dates because they apply for the foreseeable future.

There are two kinds …