When I went to university, I found myself studying Physics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. This worked out very well for me: I can wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend St Andrews as a place to study. The School of Physics is chock-full of great teachers and researchers, and my understanding is that the […]
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A Simple Printer of Nested Lists
A rant Do you ever get the urge to kill? How many of us cringe whenever we see these words? Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time developing pythonpackages.com, (now running on heroku!) during which time I see a lot of these kinds of packages being released. I kid about the killing part, but […]
The Success Of Git: Why Subversion Needs To Die
I’ve not been programming for all that long, but in that time I’ve used two different version control systems. In my internship I used Subversion (SVN), and in my personal life and open-source stuff I’ve used Git. I find the relationship between the various major VCSes to be quite interesting, and wanted to devote a […]
Politeness and Open-Source Software
Over the last couple of weeks, there has been what can really only be called a ‘brouhaha’ brewing over the role of politeness in open-source software. This argument was largely brought to the fore by a comment made by Linus Torvalds in response to a GitHub pull request. You can see the comment Linus made […]
Using Beaker for Caching? Why You’ll Want to Switch to dogpile.cache
Continuing on where I left off regarding Beaker in October (see Thoughts on Beaker), my new replacement for Beaker caching, dogpile.cache, has had a bunch of early releases. While I’m still considering it “alpha” until I know a few people have taken it around the block, it should be pretty much set for early testing […]
Test-plone tmp
Since Day 1 with Plone circa 2004, I’ve always taken pride in and greatly enjoyed refining my development environment. It’s been stable for a while now (> 1 year or so) so I thought I’d share. Operating system Mac OS X Latest (Lion, at the time of this writing) Terminal Mac OS X Terminal Editor […]
Pycon 2012 : Hand Coded Applications with SQLAlchemy
Here’s the slides from my Pycon 2012 talk, “Hand Coded Applications with SQLAlchemy”. I had a great time with this talk and thanks all for coming ! Update: Here’s the video!
Ubuntu / Redmine / Nginx / Mongrel / Supervisord
This is a howto to install Redmine on Ubuntu Natty (probably works on Debian too) with Nginx, Mongrel and Supervisord. The listed commands usually assume root permissions. Involved software: Redmine: Duh, the software you want to install 🙂 Nginx: A fast webserver/proxy from Russia Mongrel: The software used to serve redmine Supervisor: A supervisor daemon […]
Patterns Implemented by SQLAlchemy
When I first created SQLAlchemy, I knew I wanted to create something significant. It was by no means the first ORM or database abstraction layer I’d written; by 2005, I’d probably written about a dozen abstraction layers in several languages, including in Java, Perl, C and C++ (really bad C and even worse C++, one […]
dwm config – volume, battery notification, unread e-mail count & more
As many other dwm users do, I customized my .xinitrc file and the dwm status bar in to display some useful information. Here is my configuration: .xinitrc This is what my .xinitrc looks like: # set keyboard layout to Swiss German setxkbmap ch # Load .Xresources file xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources # Start xbindkeys xbindkeys & […]
New Year’s Python Meme 2011
My response My response to http://blog.ziade.org/2011/12/20/new-year039s-python-meme-2011/. It was fun answering in 2009, so I thought I’d play again. What’s the coolest Python application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011? Pyramid. In early 2011 I released vanity, which later became pythonpackages.com(more or less). I used building the site as an excuse to learn Pyramid, […]
Show MySQL Storage Engines
If you have ever wanted to know the storage engine type of every table in one of your MySQL databases, you know how tedious that can be. I have written a Python script that will simplify that task. You can get it on Github. Usage: $ ./show-engines.py or $ python show-engines.py Download: https://github.com/dbrgn/MySQL-Show-Storage-Engines
In Defense of PyPI
Everyone on the Python Planet is probably already familiar with Peter Fein’s recent article about PyPI. Everyone on the Python Planet is probably already familiar with Peter Fein’s recent article about PyPI use (or lack thereof). But in case not, particularly striking was the number of folks who joined the “PyPI bashing” in the comments. […]
Use easy_install under Arch Linux or Ubuntu
If you want to use Python’s easy_install, you need to install an additional package. Under Arch Linux, you need python2-distribute. $ pacman -S python2-distribute If you’re an Ubuntu user, install python-setuptools. $ apt-get install python-setuptools
Why some software project websites suck and others don’t
Today I gave some thoughts to what distinguishes a good software project website from a bad software project website (especially for open source projects). I came up with a few must-have criteria for a good software project website: On the very first page, state what the software does, and what the goal of the project […]