In Python web programming and frameworks, there is a constant juggling act that takes place between “explicit” and “implicit”. Too explicit, and the code may get too verbose or unwieldy. Too implicit, and the code may lose clarity or...
In retrospect, my article yesterday about WSGI Lite made a rather glaring mistake: instead of carefully laying out the background rationale and explaining where WSGI Lite fits in to today’s Python world, I threw a bunch of links at people and went...
Almost a decade ago, back when I first proposed the idea of WSGI to the Web-SIG, I had a rather idealistic vision of how WSGI could be a kind of “framework dissolver”. I envisioned a future in which everything was pluggable, and there would no...
The other day I was looking around at “tree” model libraries for Django, and I noticed that there are an awful lot of algorithms people use to manage hierarchies in SQL out there, but the one that is simplest (at least in my view) seems to not be...
Recently, I’ve been scouting around the web for examples of what people have been doing with PEAK-Rules (and the older RuleDispatch package) to get an idea of what else I should put in (if anything) before making the first official release.One of...
Python seems to keep turning up in the most unusual places. Today I went to the library and borrowed a couple of books on graphic design to assist in making some layout decisions for the book I’m working on. One was a book I’d read before, Editing...
Until I saw this neat traceback from the innards of reddit, the success of WSGI and eggs was a lot more abstract. But now, it appears they’ve got some street cred (along with Pylons, Paste, Beaker, and flup, it looks like).OTOH, since reddit was...
Every so often, I see a new package listed on the Python Package Index that claims – in its tag line, no less – that it offers some feature “without external dependencies”.The authors of such packages must think it’s a truly valuable feature, to...
I don’t usually like to blog about my client work, but in this case I’ll make an exception, since so many other people are blogging about it who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.A lot of these people, it seems, think that the Chandler...
CompUSA closing? It’s a bit hard to believe it. I remember going there back in the 80’s, for goodness sakes. Bought lots of books and software there, not to mention keyboards, mice, memory, cases, motherboards, you name it. They’ve been around...
The other day I was helping my wife debug a report she was trying to set up in her store operations software, and there was something screwy about the totals.She was trying to set up an inventory change report that would reflect the changes of...
As my self-help business has grown, I’ve been needing to ship dozens of newsletters and CDs to my members each month, not counting incidental orders for other products. Last year, I did all my shipping manually through the USPS website, but as soon...
