Creosote archive for Sat 03 of Sep, 2005

V Simple Python tutor

filter, map, reduce, lambda

bbs for poo

for paw demo?

My 10 Python Pitfalls article was translated into the Czech language, by Pavel Kosina and Petr Prikryl. (It's too bad that I don't understand a word of it... ...

pointers to gpg modules for python

TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language.

How to gather info from an old terminal-based app

Jeez, I really need this

A collection of cheat sheets, mostly for development of web applications.

This kind of sums up how BBM works: Canter's Law #1. As he says: "This will make sense - later" :-) Here's my take on it: - To make someone happy, you've got to support their format. To make everyone happy, you've got to support everyone's formats. - There are always going to be more formats than you want. Get over it. Comment

I saw the word database today with a hyphen in it ("data-base"), and it got me thinking: who coined the term "database", and where the heck did that suffix -base come from? These days we see it all over. It's used to imply database-like behavior, because it was lifted from database. For example: knowledgebase, infobase, videobase, metabase, sportbase, imagebase, and so on. (more..)

I know, I know, not another post pointing to a blog entry, but I will keep in short. I read this little entry rather quickly yesterday and thought "oh, cool, Stacey is playing at the Danforth music festival all weekend". So, when I had work to do tha...

This morning I got to notice how, while if I leave for the train station at 7:15, driving up 87...

Gotta read some stuff about configuration management and the software development process besides hacking. It seems there is a lack of tools in the open source world. Even though I am always again surprised how much better it works than in some companies.

In the course of developing MailManager, we've come across a few things in the packages we use that could be improved, and that would probably be of use to others as well, so we thought we'd experiment with some modest bounties to see if there are any developers out there who have the same itches that need sctatching.> >The first couple we have identified are:> >- ZSQL Methods: Null to None patch>- Python Library format=flowed> >If you'd like to find out more, or even better, sign up to write the code and claim the bounty yourself, then please visit /www.logicalware.org/bounties.html">/www.logicalware.org/bounties.html">/www.logicalware.org/bounties.html">/www.logicalware.org/bounties.html">/www.logicalware.org/bounties.html">http://www.logicalware.org/bounties.html.> >If these go well, we''ll look at offering more Zope and Python related bounties in the near future.> >Have fun!

As promised when he released it, Seth Godin’s ebook KnockKnock is now available for free. It’s a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve enjoyed Seth’s work in the past. All of his books have at least one powerful idea that makes the read worthwhile.

What happened to New Orleans is terrible. But as James Robertson points out, it was not unanticipated. The situation reminds me of our increasing understanding of earthquakes where I live in the Pacific Northwest. A similar hell could break out at any time here. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" addresses this recurring theme.

Steve Gillmor has a great characterization of where Google could be going. Rather than trying to build the platform for everybody, Google seems to want everybody to build the platform for them or rather, with them. Google could be engineering something at the scale of the Internet, not just producing a suite of somewhat related products.

what's a foreign minister to do? "Theater goers on New York City's Great White Way were shocked to see the President's former National Security Advisor at the Monty Python farce last night — as the rest of the cabinet responds to Hurricane Katrina..." "The Swedish media and public have sharply criticised the Swedish government — in particular Prime Minister Goran Persson and Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds — for their response to the Asian tsunami disaster. /.../ The daily Aftonbladet lashed out at Foreign Minister Freivalds with the headline "She went to the theatre" — instead of staying at her post to command a relief effort."

Despite headline stories at sites like CNN listing all the countries that want to help out not listing Canada. Canadians do want to help. Here’s a take by Kos and for another source let’s look at the CBC.

We've been wrestling problems with wireless on our Mac laptops lately. I'm posting this description on the chance that someone out there can offer some suggestions. The symptom is that my Mac laptop (an elderly G3 iBook) no longer connects...

The story from New Orleans is mind-boggling. It is shocking to see a city crumble. Every day is bringing more horror stories about confusion, desperation, looting, and death. It's hard to picture the situation from anywhere else. Remarkably, Interdictor is blogging it. He works for directNIC, and he's camped out at their data center on the 10th floor of a tower between the Superdome and the Convention Center, keeping it running on diesel generators. He's posting photos, news, rumors, impressions, questions, everything. It's fascinating, heartbreaking, and spellbinding.

Bush declares war on weather (via: Doc)

Hmmm. Google Sitemaps - use your gmail account identity. Google Talk - use your gmail account identity. Maybe gmail isn't about e-mail after all :-) Hmmmm.

One of the standard Python tools I haven't made enough use of is the built-in debugger, pdb. Jeremy Jones gives us a tutorial on it: Interactive Debugging in Python. I hope his assessment of the place of the debugger in a programmer's toolbox is inaccurate, though: (more..)

I was working on a little application that is similar to tinyurl.com (where any URL gets a unique random id that can be used to redirect with long clumsy URL strings) and came up with this little algorithm that I wanted to share with the world for some feedback. ... [853 words]

It is becoming increasingly amusing to read about the future in WikiPedia. Folks are writing in the present tense, for an audience in the present tense about something that will happen in the future tense but which, by the time many will read it, will be

"TinyERP is an Enterprise Resource Management written entirely in python."

I've just posted part one of a series of tutorials on using the MochiKit JavaScript framework to write AJAX web applications. Enjoy!

Some part of me is definitely a geek. I wound up working more than 14 hours straight today, mostly because I just couldn't stop working on the problem until it was solved, but the problem refused to solve itself. What I've been doing is creating a tr...

CNN: "The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted after the facility came under sniper fire, while groups of armed men wandered the streets, buildings smoldered and people picked through stores for what they could find. ... But officers...

"A few articles back, Uche Ogbuji discussed WordNet 2.0, a Princeton University project that aims to build a database of English words and lexical relationships between them. He showed how to extract XML serializations from the word database. In this article he continues the exploration, demonstrating code to serve up these WordNet/XML documents over Web protocols and showing you how to access these from XSLT."

"Today's security advisories: mozilla-firefox, pstotext, courier, polygen (Debian GNU/Linux); phpWebSite, pam_ldap, and MPlayer (Gentoo Linux); kernel (SUSE Linux); and python2.1, python2.2, python2.3, and gnumeric (Ubuntu Linux)."

"Pyrex wrapper for MPI (Message Passing Interface) 1.1"

"This module uses the Inotify interface provided by the linux kernel. This makes it easy to watchout for events on a lot of files"

"It would take a long time to drive between the Northern Ontario towns that make up the Roman Catholic diocese of Sault St. Marie, but they are all directly linked by more than a common faith. ... Like any decentralized business with many branch locations, the diocese is discovering that Web content management is a vital part of working together. It has also discovered that an open source tool called 'Plone' is just the software for the job."

"Debugging with print statements is alive and well. It's not the only way to do it, though. Python has a powerful interactive debugger that can let you get to the heart of your problem faster and more easily - if you know how to use it. Jeremy Jones shows off the features you absolutely must know."

"Zope Object Database: object database and persistence"

"Mapnik is an toolkit for developing GIS applications. ... High-level Python bindings (boost.python) facilitate rapid application development, targeting Zope/Plone."

Back in January, The Housing Bubble weblog was already collecting news stories about the inflated state of the US housing market. The stories at the time were mostly low-profile: a economic analysis from the FDIC, a Fannie Mae quarterly report,...

Yesterday Julie wrote about the tension between summertime and blogging (really all activities that can wait till winter). It's been a long summer for us, with house projects and lots of traveling to conferences and so forth. Now it seems like everyone wants to pack those last few moments of summer freedom in before they are all gone. I do too.

Originally this was buried in a comment to an article on Uche's weblog, but he suggested I post it on my own weblog, here goes. The history of this long running discussion is here. I think for PJE to speak about people detecting (or not) 'context and nuance' in what amounts to a rant is a bit confusing. I appreciated the rant quite a bit, but the exact thing that was missing from it was context and nuance; it wouldn't be a good rant otherwise.

generated on Sat 03 of Sep, 2005 at 01:32:22 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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