Lemonodor:

Something you won’t see at the Giant Robot store until after they decide to carry those tubgirl posters is the Introducing Python video. Jesus Christ. That’s supposed to be a marketing video?
Little known fact: everybody involved in the production of this video about the <font face="70s computer">Python Coding Language</font> knew how to code in [...]

Gary Stein of Jupiter Research pointed to Kevin Lee’s writeup of MSN AdCenter, and questioned whether the cost of management of trying to target specific demographics can become too high.
I can’t remember the source, but I read that direct marketeers usually do not make any money from their first mailout. After accounting for conversion [...]

“Air-drop programming” is a colorful analogy for a common pattern among software developers. Sometimes the best way to learn a new framework or programming language is to parachute behind enemy lines, surrender connection to any safety nets outside, and fight our way out

Nick Inglis:
Better to step onto the right boat with the wrong foot than the wrong boat with the right foot.

Do you know what happens when you have to make an electronic payment but the merchant’s phone hasn’t dialed up to the bank yet? This is what happens (at least in Australia).

I swipe my bank card,
hit the “SAVINGS” button,
type in the amount,
I type in my PIN number
hit OK
the thermal printer prints out [...]

User-initiated innovation was what made Microsoft what it is today. When the PC came along, users suddenly found that they were no longer at the mercy of the IT department. This was extremely liberating. Users found they could do things by themselves. No need for the high priests of mainframe to chant incantations for [...]

While back end code tends to prefer coarse grained interaction, front end user interfaces prefer fine-grained interaction. The reasons are:

Data validation
Capability validation
disabling buttons that user doesn’t have rights to, rather than throw exception at the end when user tries to commit the operation
Long forms
There are times when user interaction need to be broken down into [...]

Charles Petzold, in Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind, writes that “IntelliSense is … dictating the way we program”.
For example, for many years programmers have debated whether it’s best to code in a top-down manner, where you basically start with the overall structure of the program and then eventually code the more detailed routines at [...]

Show me a C# programmer who can’t get by without Visual Studio, and I’ll show you a Lisp programmer who can’t get by without Emacs.

Wrappers which intercept system calls of specific programs at kernel level, in order to restrict the capability of an attacker who has taken ownership of a firewall process.
wrappers add security functionality to an operating system which helps improve firewalls… [which] implies that operating system controls are not very helpful – after all, not much about [...]

This is significant development. Can democracy be revived through ringtones?
“This has really changed my perception of ring tones away from being just some teenage obsession where you buy some song that annoys me on the bus,” Gundersen said. “If you hear somebody’s cell phone with a recording of Bush talking about Iraq, or saying something [...]

It was a two hour drive from Brisbane to Warwick where I live. Plenty of time to ponder whether loose coupling of the road interface vs tight coupling of rail interface accounts for the large number of trucks I see on the road.

I know you are not a bot. If you persist, I’ll put up more anti forex trading links.
Foreign currency trading can disrupt economies of poor country, often forcing these country to export food which would have normally fed the poor because they fetch far higher prices overseas. To quote Chandra Muzzafar on forex trading:
The powerful [...]

IBM and Zend has been pushing for the adoption of PHP in the enterprise. Although the threat has been framed in terms of Java losing ground, the alternate view is that PHP is targetting the realm of the situated software, which has traditionally been the mainstay of the venerable e-mail, Excel, Access [...]

Jon Udell writes that blog spam will go away one day:
while we were debating the options, [e-mail] spam went away. Well, OK, it didn’t go away, but I stopped seeing the vast majority of it, thanks to the cumulative effect of filters applied to servers
The blog spam we are seeing is a result of [...]

I commented on Steve Vinoski’s blog:
Interfaces defining many kinds of messages imposes unnecessary coupling, when what is required is for documents to be thrown over the other side of the wall, leaving the other party to decide what order to parse and process the document.
To which Mark Baker posed:
So in the spirit of [...]

Ted Neward writes:
Ruby is a love affair

Over at Steve Vinoski’s blog there is a lively thread of discussion over whether Corba has failed on the internet.
Here’s a summary of the positions taken by various luminaries in the discussion:
Jon Udell (via Mark Baker)-
real difference between CORBA and Web services is that, this time around, the superplatform vendors are in somewhat better [...]

A developer using ZODBCDA with Vietnamese character-set wrote to me:
The ZODBCDA works on MS Access with Unicode but not MS SQL Server. On MS SQL Server, some characters in ntext field was not displayed correctly. Is this strange?
I’m a bit lazy and I don’t want to set up Vietnamese character set on my SQL Server, [...]

Download the latest version of CalendarTag
Unzip into your Zope Products folder C:\Zope281\lib\python\Products so that you have C:\zope281\lib\python\Products\Calendar\
Run zope (bin\runzope.bat)
Go to Zope management screen http://localhost:8080/manage
Create a DTML page
Type in the following

<dtml-calendar>
<dtml-var date fmt="%d">
</dtml-calendar>

For more help go to http://localhost:8080/HelpSys and look for more examples under Calendar.