During my last week on the job at GFDL, the manager there asked if I’d put together a presentation about Python, geared toward people who had been using Perl, or people who hadn’t done a lot of scripting at all. I said I’d do it so long as there weren’t any really advanced coders in…
I’ve Been Added
Friday was my last day working as a contractor for the GFDL. I had friends there before I ever worked there, so I’m sad to be leaving them, but I’m happy to be moving on to a really exciting opportunity. I’m now an employee of AddThis.com. I’ll be able to focus on architecture, and how…
Deep Thoughts: Printing
Some day, a language will exist that works as flawlessly across platforms as printing sucks across platforms. That will be a wonderful day (until and unless you have to print something).
Python Magazine Defies Skeptics
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…
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…
Python, regex, and IRC
So, I’m on IRC a lot. I’m on a lot of channels, too. I’m on more than one Python channel. One scenario in these chans that comes up somewhat often is one in which a user converting from PHP, Perl, Ruby, or whatever walk in and want to get a better understanding of how regex…
Recovering deleted files from an svn repository
I know I’m going to forget how to do this, because I only ever need to do it once a year or something, so I’ll put it here for safe keeping: To recover a file from svn that you deleted from your local repository, it’s first necessary to get the proper name of the file,…
PlanetPlanet++
I have to admit that I have not really made friends with Python as a web scripting language. I use it for network, system, and database scripting, and I’ve done some web services stuff with it, but I haven’t been able to use it for things that have, say, a browser interface. Until the other…
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 the Community”
Sometimes people claim they’re doing things for the good of the community, but I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean they intend to involve the community in the effort :-/ A group of open source/free software users in New Jersey (where I currently reside) learned that the hard way when the maintainer of a web site…