My laptop chartplotter software (GPSNavX) is marvelous for visualizing a route. But, there are elements to route planning that it doesn't handle gracefully.

Specifically, it doesn't provide useful elapsed time calculation at all. While the TTG and ETA (Time to Go and Estimated Time of Arrival) for the next waypoint …

Extracting legacy data can be really, really hard. However, it's of central importance because data lives forever. Application "logic" and "business rules" come and go.

Today's case study is a dusty old Dell Inspiron Laptop running Windows 98 with Chartview software.

Problem 1. Chartview. No extract or export capability, except …

In looking at Application Lifecycle Management (see "ALM Tools"), I had found that SCons appears to be pretty popular. It's not as famous as all the make variants, or Apache Ant or Apache Maven, but it seems to have a niche in the forest of Build Automation Software.

While it …

As a hypothetical, I was asked about doing Oracle Analytic functions in Python.

[Sidebar: Politics. The question came from a DBA in a C# shop. That's why it's just hypothetical. Politically, they could never make use of this information. In C# world, Functional Programming is often scary and evil. It …

I'm rewriting Building Skills in Python. 2.7 is out. As more libraries make the move, 3.1 is getting more and more viable.

I'm looking closely at the Decorators chapter (Part 3, Chapter 6).

And I'm struggling with classmethod. It's a first-class part of Python. And I'm sure there …

The question of "customization" and "extension" is a common one. For example, "non-technical users to be able to extend with simple scripts".

Read this question on Stack Overflow: "Programming / scripting language aimed at non-technical people".

This is -- at best -- little more than an attractive nuisance. At worst, of course, it …

Here's an interesting -- and common -- question.

"... any tools that I could use to create a web scraper that I could use to interact with a .aspx website?

I want to build a tool that will read an input file (e.g. an excel spreadsheet) containing a list of property parcel …

First, let me say that TDD rocks.

Few things are as much fun as (1) writing a test script for a feature, and then (2) debugging the feature incrementally until it passes the test. It's fun because a great deal of hand-wringing and over-thinking is taken off the table.

To …

Making the rounds: Droopy: easy file receiving. Apparently, there were some widely-read blog posts about this. Google "Droopy: A Tiny Web Server That Makes Receiving Files a Snap" to see the buzz.

The point here is that 750 lines of Python code can go a long way. It's a complete …

We do a lot of bulk loads. A lot.

So many that we have some standard ETL-like modules for generic "Validate", "Load", "Load_Dimension", "Load_Fact" and those sorts of obvious patterns.

Mostly our business processes amount to a "dimensional conformance and fact load", followed by extracts, followed by a different "dimensional …