I was informed today by the publisher that Python Magazine has been deemed “viable” using all of the important business metrics that they use to evaluate the magazine. This is fantastic news, and speaks volumes about the viability of the magazine in *non* business terms, as well as the model we’ve been employing at MTA…
Category: Productivity
Getting at your Google Spreadsheets columns
Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a pet project to build a command line interface to Google Spreadsheets. Basically, I find working in a spreadsheet interface to be clunky and uncomfortable. If I need to put in a new row, I’d rather just be prompted at the CLI for the values I want…
I need a Google Apps Mashup
Google Docs is nice. Calendar is really nice. Gmail is ok, too. The notion that you can more or less use any of the tools without going too far is pretty nice, and they’ve opened things up with the API just enough to get some useful plugin capabilities, *and* there’s a Python client available for…
For my next pet project…
Stand back! running install_egg_info Writing /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gdata.py-1.0.9.egg-info brj@dawg:~/working/gdata.py-1.0.9$ python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, May 2 2007, 16:27:44) [GCC 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)] on linux2 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>> import gdata >>> print ‘yay!’ yay! >>> No good can come of this! ;-P Seriously, though – I really really strongly dislike spreadsheet interfaces….
Why you should write: common myths debunked
I give a talk that advocates writing. I do this because I owe my career to people who wrote down what they knew and made it available in one form or another; either free on a web site, or in a book that I bought. When I started editing, one of my jobs was to…
A quick overview of common grammatical mistakes
Part of what I do for a living is write. I’ve co-authored a book, written a rather large number of technical articles, and I’ve also done professional editing, tech review, and manuscript review for magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses. Also, my wife is an English teacher. In short, though I make my fair share of…
Quick CVS Cheat Sheet
Actually, I’d love to say that I’ve moved completely to using git instead of CVS, but the truth of the matter is that, for a recent project where I’m just trying to consolidate a whole bunch of admin scripts, organize them under one (managed) roof, and (most importantly) get a bunch of admins on board…
Three tips to keep you focused
If you’ve read my previous posts relating to time management, you might realize by now that I tend to approach it from the opposite direction of a lot of other information sources. My philosophy is that it is easier (for me) to identify things that represent a mismanagement of time and find creative solutions to…
Google Calendar Syncing
So, I’m kinda tired of trying to find a solution to this. What I want is a non-commercial, freely available application (NOT service) that will sync bidirectionally between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, Evolution, and whatever Mozilla calls its calendar today (Sunbird?). I’ve used Spanning Sync, which worked well enough, but I never liked that…
More news for Spanning Sync Refugees
First, there are lots of people who are pretty outraged by the new Spanning Sync pricing of $25/year for a subscription service or $65 for a one-time license. The people who are the most outraged are those who are intimately familiar with how buggy it is because they were beta testers. I’m in that camp…