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…
My first interview
I was interviewed by Tony Mobily of Free Software Magazine! You can see the interview here. Also, if you’re tired of Slashdot and Digg, Tony also works on Free Software Daily.
Python 2.5’s “partition” saves my bacon
So I was on more than one IRC channel today asking a question that I got lots of answers to, all of which looked really messy to me, so I dug into the documentation and found that in Python 2.5, strings have a new method, called “partition”. Here’s the trouble I had, and why “partition”…
On the demise of SysAdmin Magazine
CMP recently announced that they will cut 200 jobs, and shut down more than one magazine in the process, folding their content into other existing magazines. There has been a lot of buzz in the sysadmin community (which I know largely as a loose collection of people who belong to LOPSA, SAGE, USENIX, or local…
Python Magazine Lives
I have a confession to make: For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been leading a secret double life. By day, I’m a mild mannered system/network/database admin in academia. I also write some PHP, Perl, and Python code. By night, however, I’m an author and editor. My latest project is bigger than most. In fact, it’s…
Winner of the first fortnightly No Bueno(tm) Award: Flickr.com
I occasionally make up words. I haven’t ever blogged them. I think the last one I made up was “Frauthentic” – a mix of “fraudulent” and “authenticity”. I use that term to describe things that come out of places like Pottery Barn that are supposed to look aged, vintage, distressed… you know. Like they come…
The Zen of Python
If you are new to Python, or you’re still on the fence, you should probably do this: 1. At a command line, run ‘python’ 2. At the resulting prompt, type ‘import this’ and hit enter.
family.append(daughter)
So, I took some time off starting last Wednesday. My daughter (and first-born child) was born on Thursday, May 24. It’s a completely overwhelming experience. Oh sure, I was like a lot of other guys, thinking I’d pass out at the sight of a baby being born, thinking it would be really cool to have…
Python: “Which of these variables is None?”
So I’m still getting past the neophyte stage with Python. The good news is that every time I need to apply some programming principle to something I’m doing in Python, it’s really very easy. Heck, I practically fell accidentally into OO programming on one of my Python projects, and everything else has been a dream…
Regular Expressions with Python’s “re” Module
If you’re moving over from PHP, Perl, Ruby or something similar, don’t be intimidated by all the Python regular expression documentation. It doesn’t really have to be complicated or even all that much different from Perl (though it can be, if you want to go there). Here’s a search and replace I ripped out of…