While the question of speed came up recently, it ties in to a long-standing position of mine. I ran some realistic benchmarks, and I'm much happier with my architecture now.

Background.

Years ago, at a Siebel conference, I heard a heretical comment. Specifically, they use the RDBMS as simple, flat …

Some additional Sugar notes recently appeared in "Plumbing Life's Depths ".

After attending PyCon, I polished up my GTK environment, reloading the current releases. Here's what I did to get a workable PyGTK on my various desktops.

The GTK Technology Stack

Here's an overview of the components of this stack:

1. GLIB …

Actually, the code looks like a clever expansion on my example, in PyCon 2007 (Revised) .

"But wait," you say. "Creating a pivot table in Python?"

Of course. Spreadsheets can create pivot tables from dimensionally normalized data. However, getting the data in this form is often challenging and if there is …

First, I'm really pleased to see a focus on end-user applications of Python. It seems like most of the Open Source Community likes to build infrastructure, operating systems, servers, frameworks and components. Maybe I'm looking in all the wrong places, but I have a soft spot in my heart for …

Things I learned at PyCon 2007 .

1. In the Open Source community, men outnumber women 571 : 22. I guess that's why I'm married to a sysadmin instead of a programmer.
2. While I already knew that programming was literature, I never really connected it with Rhetoric until hearing R0ml's keynote. If programming …

My approach to preventing IT insignificance begins with firing the good programmers, since they're saddled with low-value work to begin with. In order to see what that means, let's look at the three phases of an IT organization's collapse to irrelevance. Then we'll see why some specific reorganization steps can …

Here are some useful quotes:

• Andrew’s first law of career spotting: Accountants are people who, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use [A spreadsheet]”. Now they have two problems.
• [A spreadsheet] is a great prototyping tool, just don’t let it anywhere near your production …

First, I wrote a book on Programming with Python. It was back in the Python 2.0 days (2001 or thereabouts.) I used AppleWorks, and it was fun. Write all you want, put in formulae, code samples, everything. A few style sheets to give it a reasonable look and I …

We have a spectrum of interesting needs, and a corresponding spectrum of solutions. Here's one dimension: the structured-ness view.

1. Highly structured data.
2. Semi-structured data, or the "mixed content model". We can further subdivide this into content which is "naturally" hierarchical, and a good fit for XML, and data which is …

If we look at a spreadsheet as a document we can develop a parser that locates the user-supplied information in that document. Like any language, we'll have to treat some elements of the spreadsheet as pure syntax, little more than punctuation. In the case of embedded formulas, these are elaborate …