From my experience commercial testing of software consists of manual qa (grunt labor). Little is automated. I personally feel that even with a slight investment by developers to create unit tests, that effort would pay off later (especially in the crunch time before a big release where fixing a bug …

I guess that's one of the benefits of the "long tail" of blogging. I can get on my soapbox and speak directly to my audience. I know what to say and how to tweak their buttons. Most of my family and friends stay pretty far away from my blog since …

So after spending around 16 hours (and writing about 700 lines of original code) on Saturday preparing an entry for The Eighth Annual ICFP Programming Contest, I thought I'd share my notes and some thoughts. A chunk of this is Python specific. (see this thread for metrics of entries using …

I recently read an interesting interview with Linus. While I would recommend reading the whole interview, here are some highlights that tend to support some ideas I've been throwing around on my blog.

Open source programs have clearly made some great advances in the past few years. We've seen it …

I attended the BayPiggies meeting where Drew Perttula talked about his lighting system, light9 tonight.

The crowd was a little smaller since there was no free dinner, but there was a pretty good turnout. What a small world, Drew works two buildings away from SpikeSource at PDI, and I play …