As there appears to be some interest in branch coverage and the cool testing/metrics/quality tools that can be built upon it, I've proposed a GSOC project to start the ball rolling. (I assume it will start rolling either way, but allowing someone to devote more time to it …

This post is preceded by a public service announcement to back up all important data, often. (So far it seems the best way to back up photos is to get them printed/developed).

Had a scare with a half gig compact flash card acting up on me, that contained photo …

Here's my notes on Pycon this year. I'm going to throw out a collection of links that may or may not be useful to you. If you weren't able to make the conference, hopefully this list contains a link or two that are new or interesting to you.

• elasticwulf slides …

Here's my thoughts regarding Pycon 2008.

Benefits of conference attending

• Face time with virtual friends - Some people/IT shops invest in established technology provided by big vendors. I've been somewhat disenchanted by the products (and underlying lockin/intentions) of many vendors. Yet open source (for the most part) has provided …

I recently received the email below. At the risk of starting a flame war, I'm posting my response here.

Hi Matthew,

Sorry to bug you, but I was reading your blog and was hoping you could help me with some advice. I am new to programming and can't quiet make …

I still develop JS in basically the same way I did back in 2001. Back then IE had more of a stranglehold on the browser market, but it was a horrible JS development environment. So one would use Mozilla with the Venkman debugger to make things a little easier, then …

Like many other nerds, my wife got an Asus EEE for Christmas. (ok she isn't a nerd but her husband is). (Ok, maybe she is a nerd since I've been forcing her to using Linux for so long that she doesn't mind too much anymore).

The machine is solidly constructed …

A much as some gnomers don't like python ;), there's some good stuff coming from those that do. Andy Wingo writes of his work to reduce the memory footprint of the Flumotion Media Server. It is linux specific (and somewhat gnome/gtk specific), but if you're looking to profile memory usage …

I've spent the past days starting a MonetDB backend for SQLAlchemy. My code is currently attached to ticket 874.

Here are my thoughts after spending a bit hacking out the backend (which is really slightly usable if you have nightly of Monetdb):

• I was thinking writing the backend would require …

I'm giving an introductory talk on testing tomorrow for Utah Python. I'm planning to cover unittest, doctest, coverage and interpreting coverage results. At the end will be a hands on session for applying what we've learned. We'll write a simple program and then try and achieve good test coverage using …