Appleworks (formerly Clarisworks) is software that's been dead meat since 2007.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks#End_of_Appleworks

Which is fine unless you have an old computer with old applications that still works. For example, a 2002-vintage iMac G4 http://www.imachistory.com/2002/ still works. Slowly.

When someone …

It may be helpful to look back at 'How Managers Say "No"' which is about breaking the RDBMS Hegemony.

I got an email in which the simple concepts of "data manipulation" and "persistence" had become entangled with SQL DML to a degree that the conversation failed to make sense to …

A library had unit tests that ran for almost 600 seconds. Two small changes dropped the run time to 26 seconds.

I was amazed.

Step 1. I turned on the cProfile. I added two methods to the slowest unit test module.

def profile():
    import cProfile
    cProfile.run( 'main()', 'the_slow_module.prof' …

Some additional points on using Python 2.7 in a way that bridges the gap to Python 3.2. The steps are small and simple. You can start taking them now.

Recently I suggested that one should always include from __future__ import division, print_function on every module. Always. Every Module …

Once in a great while, you see someone engaging in Obstinate Idiocy.

Here's my recent example.

They're solving some kind of differential equation. Not sure why.

Symptom 1 of Obstinate Idiocy is No Rational Justification. The explanation is often "that's not relevant, what's relevant is this other thing I want …

Step 1. Look at the original HamCalc. Even if you aren't interested in Ham radio, it's an epic, evolving achievement in a specialized kind of engineering support. It's a repository of mountains of mathematical models, some published by the ARRL, others scattered around the internet.

Step 2. Look closely at …

After spending a couple of years (really) working with a publisher, the deal has gone south.

The problem was—likely—all mine. The book wasn't really what the publisher wanted. Perhaps it was close and they thought they could edit it into shape. And perhaps I wasn't responsive enough to …

http://madexpo.us/ June 27 - 29 Hampton, VA

I hope to see you there.

I suddenly realized that QR Codes are everywhere. Except my business cards. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/qrcode/2.0 That should allow me to solve that problem and move on.

Okay. This is seriously cool.

The Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) provides a controlled vocabulary that should be used to seed a project's data model.

See http://www.udef.com/

See http://www.opengroup.org//udef/

We're looking at applying UDEF retroactively to an existing schema.

What a pain in …