Bob On Development — Musings on the craft and business of software development

To Unicode or Not To Unicode

April 9, 2010

In another post, I discussed some issues surrounding proper coding of country and state names and design of database schemas to support global names and addresses. I mentioned that text data types for name and address elements should consider supporting accented characters — another way of saying “Unicode characters”.
In terms of SQL Server this means [...]

Read the full article →

State Secrets: Place Names in Databases, News Story Bylines, and Elsewhere

April 9, 2010

A friend turned me on to this post which heralds a very significant change to The AP StyleBook that has editors and reporters atwitter today. It impacts datelines and article body text starting May 15.
Formerly, with some important exceptions, US place names in writing that follows AP style were followed by a state abbreviation — [...]

Read the full article →

Dumb Computers Are A Good Thing

April 1, 2010

Eric Sink had some thoughts about a sea change he feels is underway in the world of computing. The short version: computers are no longer driven by the demands of uber-geeks, who are quickly becoming a minority. The new driving force are people who are willing to trade power and flexibility for simplicity. Shiny new [...]

Read the full article →

Continuous Learning is Relative

March 27, 2010

The conventional wisdom in software development is that you must always keep ahead of the alphabet soup-and-acronym marketing juggernaut that drives the technology. While I don’t disagree, exactly, I have to confess that I’m seeing an awful lot of technology that’s driven by the need of traditional software vendors to sell version upgrades and counter [...]

Read the full article →

System Administrivia

January 17, 2010

My son is a crack sysadmin, but it’s never been my area of interest. I’m a software developer. I like that if something goes wrong with software I wrote, I know exactly who to blame (me) and who can do something about it (me). With operating systems and hardware — I’m at the mercy of [...]

Read the full article →

Python: Unraveling the Snake

November 24, 2009

Something has been making me restless lately. Maybe it’s the periodic need to shake things up; maybe it’s the growing sense that I may be getting a little parochial in the Microsoft-centric alternative reality that I’ve lived in for the past 15 years or so; maybe it’s simply indigestion. Whatever the reason, I’ve been looking [...]

Read the full article →

The Kindle DX — Is it Worth the Money?

November 19, 2009

As a purchaser of the original Kindle 1 back around November of 2007, I’m a relatively early adopter of Amazon.com’s eReader technology. In general, I’ve been well satisfied with it, for a first-generation device. I find the ability to purchase most books for $9.99 or less in a very readable / usable / [...]

Read the full article →