stacyprowell.com

Health Care

I’ve seen the “public option” compared to the Post Office (by the President), and I just saw it compared to public colleges by Sen. Schumer (D-NY). Continue reading »

Health Care

In order for the market to reduce the cost to you, you need two things.

• You need to have a choice.
• You need to be the one paying the bill.

If you lack either of these, you will be, in essence, ignored by the market, almost as if you were a non-participant. Continue reading »

Barack Obama

What about Obama’s KENYAN birth certificate produced by Orly Taitz?
http://gnn.tv/threads/36212/Shocking_New_Birth_Certificate_Proof_Obama_Born_In_Kenya

I was asked about this recently. It took me less than one minute to find the following, and follow just a few of the references. Continue reading »

Programming

I spend my time (recently) writing a mishmash of Python, C++, and Java. It’s interesting to switch back and forth.

What’s a good idea and what’s a bad (or dangerous) idea in computer language design? We’ve got a lot of candidates, and a lot of opinions.

I’ll list a few here, along with a few places where they show up. Continue reading »

Sarah Palin

The Palin speech really is poetry. Read below. It makes me want to go to Alaska.

And getting up here I say:
It is the best road trip in America.
Soaring through nature’s finest show.
Denali, the great one,
Soaring under the midnight sun.
And then the extremes.

Continue reading »

Programming

I recently heard about a Car Talk puzzler.  I don’t listen to Car Talk as much as I used to.  Anyway, you can read about the puzzler and the fellow who solved it here.  This is an excerpt.

During Christmas week on the popular National Public Radio show Car Talk, the weekly puzzler required listeners to find the longest English word that remains a valid English word as you remove its letters one at a time, but without rearranging any of the letters. For example: sprite, spit, pit, it, I. There are many such words, but, as Barr discovered, only one with 11 letters.

So, only one word with eleven letters: complecting.  Maybe.  I’m not convinced, but finding out is easy.
Continue reading »

Sure, we all want to be successful, but we can’t all be, since success must be measured against the failures of your peers. Preferably spectacular failures, with a well-timed “I told them so.” But you aren’t like other people: you read my blog, so you’re gonna get some inside information to make you $ucce$$ful! Continue reading »

Apple

For the record, here’s how I set the MAC address on my MacBook Pro. As I write this it is running Leopard 10.5.6 and this has been working successfully with every version of Leopard. In fact, it has worked so well I’d forgotten how I did it, so I’m basically writing this post so, if it ever stops working, I will know how to fix it. If it helps you, all the better. If it hurts you… well… don’t blame me. Continue reading »

Programming

I need to generate multipart/form-data (see here) messages from Python. Never mind why. I dug around in the documentation for httplib, urllib, and urllib2, but it seems this is not currently supported (it’s Issue 3244). I didn’t like the code I found on the web to do it, because I needed to set additional headers on each piece. So… I wrote something. Here it is. If it’s useful to you, great! If you find bugs in it, please let me know. I think this is pretty easy to use.
Continue reading »

In “Embracing Change with Extreme Programming” (IEEE Computer, 1999), Kent Beck writes:

Some methodologies, like Cleanroom, prohibit programmers testing or in some cases even compiling their own programs.

As evidence of this he cites the text Cleanroom Software Engineering: Technology and Process, by, among others, yours truly.  I for one have never said that people should not run unit tests, nor does the above text say that.  I emailed Mr. Beck about it, and he confirmed that he did not get this from the cited text.  Whew!

Just to be clear, here is my position.  I would never tell anyone not to run a test they felt was necessary. I may personally believe there are efficient and inefficient ways to test, but I’m not an expert in every domain.  The people who create a product are responsible for the consequences of release of that product, and should act accordingly. Continue reading »