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Commented on Groklaw: Don't go home, go big

I haven't met her in person (yet). She's as real and human as anyone else known only electronically.I'm not in a position to judge whether she ever had help writing for Groklaw, and have little interest myself in pursuit of that line.While I don't agree with everything PJ writes, I have no doubt that she's an individual who lives in a particular place. I don't find what I know of her participation in public debate disqualifies her priority on privacy, or vice-versa.

1 year ago

Commented on Database round-up

Don't miss it.

2 years ago

Commented on What an IronPython user should know about Python 3

We're now maintaining a Wiki page on the subject of 2-vs.-3 at http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3. I recommend it.

2 years ago

Commented on How to repair a full Unix directory

Anonymous, I like your pipeline fine. You're right, it has multiple advantages. I intentionally chose to write intermediate results to a named file because I was on a noisy channel with my questioner; I thought I had a better chance of communicating the point with him in terms of a more concrete $INTERMEDIATE_FILE he could inspect for himself. Thanks, though, for offering the pipeline.

2 years ago

Commented on Documentation and imagination crucial to SVG

Isaac, I'm sorry. Firefox is an important browser; there's no question about that. I thought I'd tested all the combinations well before opening that page to the public. I've clearly overlooked something crucial. I use SVG with Firefox daily in my own work, so I'm sure there's a small error I'll correct soon after I make my way back to my own desk. Please check back tomorrow, and give me another chance to show what SVG can do for you (at least, when you're more careful than I apparently was).Thanks, by the way, for the careful precision of your report.

2 years ago

Commented on Remote-control and related software

One point neither I nor the original questioner have made clear yet is that VNC does deserve attention. Even though I've been writing about it for over ten years, it's not "used up" yet. There are plenty of new and exciting VNC initiatives right now, in spring of 2010; most dramatic is all that Intel is doing in building VNC directly into hardware.

2 years ago

Commented on Remote-control and related software

I've been in touch with the original questioner since I posted the article, and I understand now a little better--but only a little--what he's after. (Self-)education is his motivation, not business: he wants "to learn ... just the basics ..."I remain wary of the question. Without knowing more about the background of the questioner, it strikes me there might be quite a bit to learn, including:

• the RFB protocol underlying VNC,
• server-side Web application programming, and
• difficult Web GUI work.

2 years ago

Commented on SVG is a good scratchpad for programmers

Yes, you're quite right that Firefox does NOT yet support SVG animation. Much gnashing of teeth results in the SVG community; for some practitioners, animation is thoroughly expendable, while for others, it's at least half of the SVG story that is worth telling.(Declarative) animation is pleasant when it works (in Chrome, Safari, Opera, ...). The two leading browsers don't have it, and won't, soon.

2 years ago

Commented on PDF pagination only takes a few lines

Stephan, I can't thank you enough for your patience. I recognize this comment thread is a clumsy medium for deep code-diving, and so particularly appreciate you coming back here to help get this matter straight. You keep writing, and I'll keep answering, even if, on occasion, travels or meetings keep me away for a day or two.I don't understand your description. When you write "template", I'm not sure if you have in mind the "Page %d of %d" string, or one of the PdfTemplate-s? In any case, I *do* know the count of pages, even before writing the very first one. Line #31 of assigns 'total' immediately after opening the PDF instance, well before anything within the PDF instance has been updated. What am I missing?

2 years ago

Commented on PDF pagination only takes a few lines

Stephan, tell me more--how does the technique fail, in your experience? I can tell you it's certainly filled a need for us. Are you saying that it breaks down for other fonts, other page sizes, ...?

2 years ago

Commented on "Embeddability" is IronPython's great feature

I take performance seriously, Eduardo; I'm glad you raised the question, because responsiveness certainly is crucial to me and my customers.In general, performance is rarely a pressing problem in my Python work. More precisely, performance issues in our Python-based applications generally are amenable to algorithmic improvements, and it's quite rare that a switch to C or comparable is our approach, although it's always a comfort, of course, to know that we can make that switch when necessary.IronPython, in particular, has stunned me several times with its performance. It's quite a good implementation, and generally hums along quite speedily. The IronPython team deserves a lot of credit for what it has achieved.HOWEVER, Python has a couple of notorious bottlenecks. One is on startup; an apparently-innocent import sys hides complexity that would surprise you, and can significantly bog down the whole application. Might that fit your situation? It's good news if so, because there are definite techniques for improving the time of module look-up.

2 years ago

Commented on HTML 5: The tipping point is with developers, not browsers

Thanks for the reference, Nik Harris; I was *not* aware of orderedlist before.'Any topics you'd like to see "Smart Development" cover, Nik?

2 years ago

Commented on What the healthcare bill means to IT workers

A law firm makes this summary available.

2 years ago

Commented on Is Microsoft leading or following with SVG?

I intended to provide a link to Abbra's press release at CES.

2 years ago

Commented on List comprehensions can help your programming

Gosh, no. We can certainly trace 'em back to SETL, forty years ago.What might be new, though, is how many programmers continue to overlook them, and plenty of other useful language features. While we can't all learn every cranny of every language, functional elements including comprehensions, map, filter, ... are increasingly available, and plenty practical. That's the point I want to make: working programmers, with little time to spare, ought to invest a least a sliver more than I see them doing at exploring the functional offerings in languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, XPath, and so on.Comparison between map-filter and comprehension is indeed interesting; that's why the original post mentions piman's remarks.

2 years ago

Commented on GDB is a Platform

plaes, you're absolutely right. Let's see how quickly I can correct that title ...

3 years ago

Commented on "Always-on" benefits in debugging

Here is a useful bibliography for working programmers ready to take on the multi-core monster.

3 years ago

Commented on Latest gdb important milestone

Yes and no. No, there aren't executable debuggers for the overwhelming majority of "requirements" and "designs". Yes, though, there's a vast literature on techniques to formalize and automate analysis and design.

Thanks for raising the question. I'll make a point of covering it in more detail in November 2009. For now, I'll simply offer the tip that the smartest single thing I know to do is to bring in testers and documenters as early in a development cycle as possible. Applications that can't be verified or explained ... well, that stacks the odds against success.

3 years ago

Commented on Are Macs the mainstay or the bonus?

While I assume Naked Bunny already realizes this, I'll document it for others who might be reading the thread: Mac OS has built in a thoroughly usable RDP client for at least four years. In my office right now are three open laptops. The Mac is the oldest. It's the one I use for RDP.

I entirely agree that large swathes of computing life amount to use of terminals or slightly-glorified variants.

3 years ago

Commented on Clean your data

Right: I know of no formal approach that can reasonably guarantee correctness. What we do have, though, are good probabilistic models that allow estimation of, for instance, mean-time-to-next-detection-of-a-fault.

So what do we do in the meantime? I like to start with what's already at hand; an example is the analysis that supported construction of an existing schema. I take those things seriously; if one says that each customer has a single customer ID, I write executable code to confirm the same. I've written about a few of the SQL expressions that I find useful.

I entirely agree with putting such results in front of users. In different organizations, I schedule daily or weekly anomaly reports to be e-mailed to managers, and/or provide Web pages that report on "live" data. While cleaning out anomalies doesn't make all data correct, it can be extremely instructive to trace back to the root causes of errors; the effort that goes into correction of such trivialities as spelling errors or inconsistent capitalization tends to turn up deeper issues.

I look for anomalies of all kinds. If we have a dozen different groups where users have chosen a few thousand instances each, but one group with only five members, I suspect a problem. If string data with the high bit set starts to show up in a table of user-readable content, I investigate.

There aren't technical solutions in this area, but there certainly are technical tools, ones that, in the hands of an experienced practitioner, can help reduce the incidence of errors by orders of magnitude.

3 years ago

Commented on An Abbreviated History of ACP, One of the Oldest Open Source Applications

You write so well it's hard to summarize what you've done any more briefly than the article itself. I like your emphasis, though, that a typical developer's loyalty was to "code quality, the development community, and ... the best answer ..."; as others have already detailed, while ACP deserves the crown as much as any application, its ethos pervaded wide swathes of computing at that time. An example: engineers, mathematicians, and others all co-operated in and benefitted from work in numerical methods epitomized by, for example, the '68 publication of Computer Approximations (which remains valuable, by the way, despite being out of print).

3 years ago

Commented on Python and the power of 'first class' everything

Dave, will you be following up with notes on styling lists-vs-tuples?

3 years ago

Commented on PDF widely misunderstood

"Compression" and "forms" are indeed important topics for PDF management. I think I'll schedule them for early fall, though; my calendar is already filling. Keep checking back here--or, if you write me personally, I can make a point of alerting you when I say more about them.I've never worked with PDFTextStream. I like what I read about the company's evaluation policy, though. Thanks for the tip. The curious thing about work in this area is that, in my observation, the people who have the most success with content-extraction from PDF are the ones who are wariest of it. Ten years ago, it was simply a bad idea, as far as I was concerned; more recently, though, both proprietary products and open-source ones have become quite capable.

3 years ago