See "When a Column is Not a Column " for a rant on failed attempts to scale spreadsheets up into relational databases. Bottom Line: A spreadsheet column is rarely an RDBMS column. Often the SS column's label is a key value, just like the SS row's label, and the cell's value …

Here's what I observed.

Customer: "Our business performance isn't what we want. We think some of our intranet is no good."

Us: "We'd love to look at it."

Customer: "Not so fast. You can't 'look at it'. You have to propose a measurable change in business performance, define a fixed …

To begin with, we're talking about the implementation's source code. Here's the situation: Ann says that Bob's code is no good, and she's provided an alternative implementation. How do we choose?

The first part of any scorecard is the SEI Quality Measures Taxonomy . It's marked "Legacy", but I haven't seen …

This is an important topic. I've blogged on the layers issue before ("Layers, Interfaces and Mutabilty "), and this AJAX issue is a great additional point.

With depressing regularity I also hear the complementary "stored procedure" question. This question takes a number of different forms, but they all mean the same …

Here's the full, minimally-edited question:

"We are having a debate about the basic way the UI, Business Logic, and Data Access layers communicate.

My experience has been that the UI talks to the BizLogic, and the BizLogic maps between itself and the Data Access layer.. like this:

::

UI -> BizLogic -> Data …

First, see "OSCON - Open Data " by Tim Bray, then see "Set My Data Free " in Kontrawize.

Here are some quotes "At the end of the day, information outlives software and transcends software and is more valuable than software." "Data matters. It shouldn't be an afterthought. It will outlive your applications …

See The hubris of calendrical calculations. And Calendrical Calculations, Part 2.

"Here are the exact words from the client when I suggested using the "official calendar": I’m aware of other systems having tables for Holidays but I don’t know that we can piggy back off any of them …

While "Browser as OS" is what appears to be happening. The browser is the front-end for many applications. Even in the Ajax case, however, the browser is only one piece of the application, and the browser isn't relevant on the server side.

The important point that is missed in the …

Here's another symptom of a Request for Faerie Dust™:

A proposal that includes (1) analysis, (2) proof-of-concept, and (3) a plan for a solution.

Sounds sensible, doesn't it? Study it, prove that you can solve it, and write the complete plan to solve it.

Sounded sensible to me, until I …

Without mentioning Armour's The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software (which includes the Five Orders of Ignorance, quoted by Paul Freedman in "Uncovering Ignorance in Software Development "), Purdy has hit the nail on the head regarding gestation of architectures.

Is Gestation overhead …