First, the confusion. A couple of comments asked for code, offering to "fix" the problems. Specifically, offering to optimize or improve the PL/SQL. The code was already posted, but I failed to make that clear. Here's a recap of the various blog entries on this subject.

1. PL/SQL vs …

There appear to be four responses. Two were numbered, the third is a rambling thought on scalability, and the fourth is a thought on management's discomfort with the truth.

There are three reasons, none of them terribly good in isolation.

1. I build business applications, not graphics applications, so the "basic" GTK was precisely what I needed.
2. PyCairo is (to me) a fairly recent innovation, and my GTK knowledge is a few years old.
3. Cairo requires a more complex technology …

Mr. Hayes says that "...we’re afraid that programmers simply won’t use the hot new technology and that the money we spend on it will be wasted." He plays up this fear factor, providing lots of programmer-centric reasons: "Either programmers don’t use the tools at all, or they …

Much of the work called "Business Analysis" conflates business problem discovery and technical meddling. I draw a firm line between the discovery part of analysis and the non-discovery (or design) part. Discovery is all about managing ignorance; this can be ignorance of the business need or ignorance of the available …

Here's a simple graphic application which is built on the graphicApp.py framework. This isn't a beginner's hello world. This is the final project kind of program, and only for a student with some trigonometry background. The basic trig isn't too complex, but would require rather detailed documentation to motivate …

Background.

The suggested environment for learning to program using graphics instead of text was LiveWires . This includes a curriculum and associated product, making it a tidy package.

There are a number of alternatives, however.

• Python includes tkinter , section 20.1 of the Python Library Reference, v2.5.
• Python includes turtle …

Some additional Sugar notes recently appeared in "Plumbing Life's Depths ".

After attending PyCon, I polished up my GTK environment, reloading the current releases. Here's what I did to get a workable PyGTK on my various desktops.

The GTK Technology Stack

Here's an overview of the components of this stack:

1. GLIB …

Here are some useful quotes:

• Andrew’s first law of career spotting: Accountants are people who, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use [A spreadsheet]”. Now they have two problems.
• [A spreadsheet] is a great prototyping tool, just don’t let it anywhere near your production …

If we look at a spreadsheet as a document we can develop a parser that locates the user-supplied information in that document. Like any language, we'll have to treat some elements of the spreadsheet as pure syntax, little more than punctuation. In the case of embedded formulas, these are elaborate …