In the 1990s Nicholas Negroponte wrote a back-of-the-book column in Wired. When I started reading it, in 1993, I found it exciting and mind-opening. But as the years wore on, the ideas seemed less interesting. Maybe he just ran out of new things to say, or maybe I became jaded. In any case, I hadn’t paid much attention to him since. But this bit from a recent AP story on the One Laptop Per Child project absolutely kicks ass:

A small but common task in web interfaces, especially “admin” (back-end, content manager) interfaces, is sequencing items. Any time you have a collection of objects that requires arbitrary, user-defined ordering (i.e. ordering that can’t be derived from the objects’ values) you are faced with this problem. Navigation is a common example. If people can add items to a dynamically built navigation menu or tree, how do we let them specify the ordering so that “Contact” can appear below “About Us” or vice-versa?

Kevin Barnes has an interesting post about software rewrites. Here are some of the questions he thinks you should be able to answer “yes” to in order to proceed with a high chance of success:

• Do you honestly believe that if you rewrote it without adding any features the resulting code would be 33% smaller than the current code?
• Do you have a very senior sponsor who understands and believes in the project?
• Can you get enough resources (even on a temporary basis) to support development on the old code base while the new code is written?
• Is the project critically important to the company’s future?
• Can the company go without a major release of the product for half the planned coding duration?
• Do you have anyone on the team who has successfully rewritten a major piece of software before?

I find his list thought provoking for two reasons. First, like (all|most) programmers, of course I have applications in use that I would like to rewrite.

I’ve created an updated Plucker version of the Python Library Reference for Python 2.5. It weighs in at 1.7MB, a bit fatter than the last one mostly because I tweaked the spidering depth to keep deeply nested pages from being skipped. All twelve of you who have an interest in such a thing can find it here:

$ sudo portupgrade php5 php5-curl php5-sqlite php5-bla bla bla...
--->  Upgrading 'php5 bla bla bla...'
...
[Updating the pkgdb bla bla... done]
$ sudo apachectl graceful
$