My books (Building Skills in Programming, Building Skills in Python and Building Skills in OO Design) develop a steady stream of email. [Also, as a side note, I need to move them to the me.com server, Apple is decommissioning the homepage.mac.com domain.]

The mail falls into several …

Lots of folks like to wring their hands over the Big Vague Concept (BVC™) labeled "security".

There's a lot of quibbling. Let's move beyond BVC to the interesting stuff.

I've wasted hours listening to people identify risks and costs of something that's not very complex. I've been plagued by folks …

For years, I've been using Apache POI in Java and XLRD in Python to read spreadsheets. Finally, now that .XLSX and .XLSM files are in more widespread use, we can move away from those packages and their reliance on successful reverse engineering of undocumented features.

Spreadsheets are -- BTW -- the universal …

Here's a typical problem that results from "SQL Hegemony" -- all data must be in a database, and all access must be via SQL. This can also be called the "SQL Fetish" school of programming.

War Story. On a Data Warehousing project, we had to load and process the organizational hierarchy …

Sometimes I think we need professional certification in this industry. I supported the ICCP for a long time.

In addition to certification, which requires ongoing educational credits to maintain, there ought to be a process for revoking one's certification, requiring them to pass their exams again.

Here's three strikes against …

See "Commenting the Code".

This posting tickled my fancy because it addressed the central issue of "what requires comments outside Python docstrings". All functions, classes, modules and packages require docstrings. That's clear. But which lines of code require additional documentation?

We use Sphinx, so we make extensive use of docstrings …

A DBA suggested that I read up on "Practical API Design: Confessions of a Java Framework Architect".

Apparently the DBA had read the phrase "direct compiler support of versioning of APIs" in a review of the book and -- immediately -- become terribly confused.

I can see why a DBA would be …

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 …