Steven’s Notebook

This past week, I read Practices of an Agile Developer, not because I’m currently employed as a developer, nor because my employer uses them, but because I believe the guidelines are good ones to be practiced no matter what the profession. Check out some readers’ notes, then invest some time in the book yourself, especially [...]

Application development, especially User Interface, is very much about “the little things.” The things that make life easier for users. Here’s a simple example, one that bugs me almost every time I use a browser.
There are probably URLs that you type often and, for whatever reason, you don’t bother to make into bookmarks or [...]

Quote of the Week:
Python is the new BASIC.
- Dave Winer

I think I’d say that it’s the new (Turbo) Pascal, but I agree with Dave. Fast (enough), available, and easy (enough) to learn. There’s no excuse not to get out and start programming if you’ve got any thought at all of doing so.

I assigned myself a project for the weekend, writing a little program that I could use to disable comments on blog posts based on their age. Python’s already installed on the Mac, so I figured it’d be pretty easy to use that to make updates to my Wordpress database.
The first thing needed is the [...]

Add that to my ever growing list of “things-that-would-be-nice-to-learn-when-I-have -he-time-to-actually-learn-something-new.

You said it, Rob.

Here’s a little bit of Perl code from a module we use. These functions are used by our cron-driven Perl scripts to (re-)set file ownership after they’ve
finished working their magic. They’re probably nowhere near perfect
and I welcome any suggestions you may have to improve upon them.
Feel free to use this code in your own project [...]