tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74198272582629149452025-01-20T01:14:35.298-08:00"When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." <br /> -- Alex MartelliUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-22919627442385701932010-11-08T14:55:00.000-08:002012-10-29T14:09:51.717-07:00

Have you ever looked at the Python.org Job Board? It lists in chronological order postings sent by recruiters and employers looking for developers with skills and interests in Python. The Job Board has been around since at least 1997 (I checked using the WayBack Machine just to see what it looked like) and not too much has changed since then. New postings are sent by email and a volunteer cuts

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-19195131979815875702010-11-08T12:34:00.000-08:002010-11-08T12:34:56.598-08:00

I have not written anything in here for a while because: 1) I'm too busy 2) I don't have anything interesting to say 3) No-one reads this, right? A funny thing happened today.. I found this post from Steve Yegge that brushed aside my dejected writer's block and reminded me why I started blogging in the first place - partly to help me remember interesting things and partly to improve my writing

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-55668332849111382162010-07-12T12:33:00.000-07:002010-07-12T12:33:40.174-07:00

Not literally moving house but I decided it was time to upgrade my python.org local build machine from Redhat ES4 to something more recent so I fired up a Fedora Core 11 VM that I haven't been using so far, copied over my SSH keys and started checking out the website svn repository. There was nothing wrong particularly with ES4 but Xemacs is a little long in the tooth now and didn't want to mess

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-16676151165820772242010-06-26T10:48:00.000-07:002010-06-26T10:48:19.385-07:00

Using TagCrowd (http://www.tagcrowd.com), I created this visualisation of the most common words on the Python Job Board (after removing meaningless, high-frequency words like contact, description, e-mail etc). <!-- #htmltagcloud{ /****************************************** * CUSTOMIZE CLOUD CSS BELOW (optional) */ font-size: 100%; width: auto; /* auto or fixed width, e.g. 500px */

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-32863538024534460172010-01-27T06:43:00.000-08:002010-01-27T06:49:27.095-08:00

I am doing a lot of work involving the Samba code base right now and it has frustrated me that I cannot check out the trunk using git because I am behind a firewall.. then again the tarballs for the stable releases have been adequate until I realised that my tinker toy modifications needed to be made into patches and that was tricky..Long story short:if you try 'git clone git://git.samba.org/

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-67712265812389863112009-07-21T20:35:00.000-07:002010-05-06T11:43:09.065-07:00

"Gestalt is a library released by MIX Online Labs that allows you to write Ruby, Python & XAML code in your (X)HTML pages. It enables you to build richer and more powerful web applications by marrying the benefits of expressive languages, modern compilers, AJAX & RIAs with the write » save » refresh development model of the web." Python on a web page! In Silverlight .. which means it is time to

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-74684302390724403392009-06-18T21:02:00.000-07:002009-07-20T13:27:42.014-07:00

Creating a table with a column of type INT PRIMARY KEY will not result in automatic assignment of a unique value into that column when new rows are added. Why not? In part because INT is not a type in SQLite (but you can use it and the column will have integer affinity but you have to provide the value) and partly because rowid assignment only occurs on columns defined as INTEGER PRIMARY KEY.Take

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-27057856334708047852009-06-07T15:35:00.001-07:002009-06-07T16:00:19.312-07:00

ROWID is a reserved word in SQLite which seems reasonable.. but it has a synonym OID so if you declare a table with a column called OID then select from that table without using the table name as a prefix, you will not get what you expect.If you are using an ORM to abstract away the database then you may never realise what is going on..

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-55205909142802564532009-06-07T15:15:00.000-07:002009-06-07T15:17:06.362-07:00

What will this give you?>>> astring = None>>> print unicode(astring)If you said None then you will be surprised to find the answer is u"None" which is not at all the same thing. Really messed up my day..

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-84022821490073287752009-06-01T07:56:00.000-07:002009-06-01T10:42:19.198-07:00

Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, sucks. This conclusion is based on one simple test:Enter "internet search" as your search term and the results do not contain Yahoo, Google, Bing or LiveSearch. Dogpile is the number one hit. Remove the word internet and now you get Yahoo listed top.Try the same test on Yahoo and it lists Bing first in a sponsored results box, followed by Yahoo and

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-90814051327939677652009-05-10T09:44:00.000-07:002009-06-01T10:42:56.545-07:00

I am trying to be more organized on my Mac. As part of this I have added some new apps: Cyber Duck (a pretty good FTP client) and Syrinx for twitter. They work, they don't get in the way and they look they are part of the system.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-67590246518816999802009-04-12T18:52:00.001-07:002009-06-01T10:43:45.553-07:00

The QuestionI was asked a question on the way out of the office at the end of the week: what is the difference between a regex match and a regex search?It didn't seem like a difficult question but it stumped me for a little while. Both a search and a match should use a regular expression and evaluate it against a text. Perhaps a regex search traverses the input string and returns one result at a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-8314287813212655782009-04-11T06:40:00.000-07:002009-04-11T06:54:36.204-07:00

If you think the compiler is wrong, you are 99.999% certain to be the problem.*This number may vary according to the platform and the compiler.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-74180001306168865162009-04-04T07:47:00.000-07:002009-04-04T07:56:34.919-07:00

I need to find some spare time, perhaps just some of that discretionary sleeping time, to take a look at web2py. I have a small project in mind - updating my friends website to have a simple calendar and appointment system - but I have been getting slammed at the office porting an application to AIX (yes, it's still in use) and busy at home with the twins.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-33727655322043611032009-01-25T20:56:00.000-08:002009-01-25T20:58:32.894-08:00

According to a link on Slashdot, Linus Torvalds has finally come to his senses and now agrees with me that Gnome is a better choice for a desktop than KDE.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-8033162861344189832008-12-21T08:43:00.000-08:002008-12-21T08:47:56.889-08:00

Brad added this link for the best Mac downloads of 2008 to his del.icio.us account and it has several interesting entries including Timemachine backups over the network, Dropbox (file synchronization over the net) and XBMC (a very nice looking cross platform media center).

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-2386449745575751932008-12-21T08:33:00.000-08:002008-12-21T08:43:22.628-08:00

I use an external HD to to carry large files between home and office but the Mac (or at least Leopard) doesn't support NTFS as a writable filesystem so the arrangement is only useful when all the new data is at the office and nothing needs to be changed at home. Obviously this is not ideal.MacFUSE allows the addition of new fileystems to the Mac including NTFS-3g which originated on Linux (I

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-7592476101514061092008-12-10T12:33:00.000-08:002008-12-10T12:37:43.691-08:00

A teacher in Austin, TX did not like what she saw when she found a student in her class experimenting with a liveCD from HeliOS.. so she confiscated the CD, reprimanded the student and then wrote a letter to his after explaining he was potentially liable to a civil suit and that the kids should be using Microsoft products which they (MS) would be happy to supply for free..Wow.Breathlessly

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-17438667199134274682008-12-03T08:29:00.000-08:002008-12-03T08:35:15.589-08:00

Video player for toddler.Meghan likes watching DVDs in the minivan and she likes banging on the keys of the OLPC so I combined the two. I used Handbrake to rip one of her favorite DVDs then loaded mplayer onto the OLPC and played back the movie from a a thumb-drive. VLC and mplayer had similar problems with freezing before announcing the file was longer available. I tried turning off power

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-88522797875543731702008-12-03T07:07:00.000-08:002008-12-03T07:33:03.866-08:00

This somewhat risible survey reveals that Perl has almost fallen out of the top 10 programming langauges in use. Given the many different ways that statistics can be mashed together and the loose method of collecting the numbers, I think it is unlikely that they can claim 3 decimal places of accuracy for any of this.On the other hand, using activity as a barometer of interest in a langugae and

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-24879515796653530832008-12-02T18:41:00.000-08:002008-12-02T18:44:07.491-08:00

I noticed that turning the radio off and then back on from the OLPC control panel resulted in being endlessly prompted for my WEP password.. so I investigated a little more and then raised this defect .. now I will have to see if there is something similar in Fedora.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-45777542740781755062008-11-30T11:17:00.001-08:002008-11-30T11:21:33.761-08:00

Baby webcam monitor..Downloaded motion and set it up, put the lpatop on some furniture and left my daughter sleeping while I watched her in a browser window from another room. It worked ok.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-25713553424268117322008-11-12T07:09:00.000-08:002008-11-12T07:59:51.046-08:00

Funny thing coincidences.. I was talking to a co-worker about the OLPC and suggesting he avoid vmware images or ISOs and that instead he should use a Fedora system and add Sugar from RPM because the ISOs that I had seen and become out-of-date or unavailable.. and then we found Sebastian Dziallas reports there is a new spin of Sugar available from Fedora. This is a customized version of Fedora

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-67443229334305677432008-11-06T15:07:00.000-08:002008-11-30T11:23:20.838-08:00

About two weeks ago, I was at Nerdbooks (check them out at http://www.nerdbooks.com) and I bought a couple of great books; The Art of Debugging and Programming Ruby. The Art of Debugging by Matloff and Salzman from Nostarch Press. I picked this up off the shelf and found a couple of things I didn't know about using gdb inside a minute so I went ahead and got it. The plan is to have it around for

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7419827258262914945.post-45510424790002057862008-10-17T17:44:00.001-07:002008-10-17T17:45:09.254-07:00

I just tried the Nerd Quiz and thought I was doing so-so, kind of average (missed some of the questions) so I was surprised to get this:

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0