Part II - We let the C.R.A.P. out of the bag. We explain our thinking behind the first version of the CRAP metric and then unveil the formula.

Part I - Beauty and The Beast. I begin my exploration of ugliness in code with some background and an overview of what most people consider to be crappy code.

To what extent should a project or company have a coding style policy, and how and to what extent do you think it should be enforced?

By allowing third-party applications to piggyback on its Safari 3 browser platform, Apple chose Ajax as the development platform for its popular iPhone device. What will that mean for mobile development?

August 15-17 I will be holding an OpenSpace conference to discuss the reasonable distribution of an application between client and server, with emphasis on the return to Rich Internet clients.

August 13-14 I will be holding (with James Ward of Adobe) a Jam on Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly called Apollo).

To what extent does the productivity of dynamic languages come from the lack of typed variables versus the reduction in "finger typing" required when you don't have to declare the types? The technique of type inferencing in static languages may shed new light on this old debate.

Type arguments to generic classes are not available for reflection at runtime - or are they? The type arguments for statically declared types can be discovered at runtime. A look at how to do this, and why you might want to.

Combine the power of Python with the polish of Flash to create a desktop application. This approach will also work with any language that has support for creating an XML-RPC server (Java, Ruby, C++, to name a few). Also, The XML-RPC server can easily be on another machine.

Here's a long-awaited update on where the Python 3000 project stands. We're looking at a modest two months of schedule slip, and many exciting new features. I'll be presenting this in person several times over the next two months.

Applications with a rich-client UI can benefit from concurrency. UI toolkits that expose concurrency, however, are not easy to use. Swing shows that the tension between concurrency and ease-of-use is hard to resolve. Just how much concurrency should be exposed in a UI toolkit?

iTunes is far more than a desktop music player and organizer: it is also a path through which over 300 million users have already installed Apple's open-source dynamic networking software, Bonjour. Has the time for spontaneous networking finally arrived?

Attempting to find a compromise between the constraints of a facade that wraps a system API, the limitations of a limited namespace naming scheme, and a user wanting more expressiveness, revealed an interesting compromise in design.

One of the key differences between the different Java inner class and closure proposals is the lexical scope of names, this blog compares the scoping of the major proposals (CICE + ARM, C3S, FCM + JCA, and BGGA in both its forms)

I'll be doing a new experiment for this one: hiking in the morning instead of the afternoon.