Category Archives: General

Transcript of Radiolab’s “Words” episode for the hearing impaired.

When I heard the Radiolab episode “Words” on their podcast, one of the first things that came to mind was sharing the story of the deaf children in Nicaragua with a deaf friend of mine.  I spent a few minutes … Continue reading

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Python datetime quiz

Without looking at the documentation (or running the code), describe the outputs of the following 4 function calls: from datetime import datetime datetime.datetime.now() datetime.datetime.today() datetime.datetime.now().date() datetime.datetime.today().date() Post your answers as a comment.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Pitfalls of Python’s ‘is’ operator

I saw this post on Friendfeed, and thought I’d reproduce the code here, because it’s a really interesting Python snippet, and to me, basically says never, ever use the ‘is’ operator.  Here’s the snippet that I just reproduced on Python … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

5 Things you think upgrading your computer software is going to do.

When you upgrade your computer’s OS or some big program, you’re always doing it for a reason.  Here they are: Upgrading is going to support the drivers for that new device you just got. (Sorry, it won’t.) Upgrading is going … Continue reading

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Using Django’s widthratio template tag for multiplication & division.

I find it a bit odd that Django has a template filter for adding values, but none for multiplication and division. It’s fairly straightforward to add your own math tags or filters, but why bother if you can use the … Continue reading

Posted in General | 2 Comments

How to tell when your method is on the wrong class.

1. Your code uses self on the RHS of an assignment. Here’s a Python example: class accumulator(object): def __init__(self): self.sum = 0 class value(object): def __init__(self): self.value = 0 def accumulate(self, accum_instance): accum_instance.sum += self.value Instead of saying: a = … Continue reading

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Best error message I’ve seen in a long time.

This came from a Gnome-enabled program on by Ubuntu 10.04 system.  It pretty much sums up what’s wrong with “Linux on the desktop” Error setting value: No database available to save your configuration: Unable to store a value at key … Continue reading

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Hey Flipboard! Those are my kids!

So, the press is somewhat buzzing about the new Flipboard iPad app, as well as their acquisition of Ellerdale.  Here’s a screenshot of the second page of their slideshow: (click to zoom).  The large image of the kid with the … Continue reading

Posted in General | 3 Comments

Alternative to GoDaddy DNS hosting?

I’ve heard that GoDaddy is a pretty crappy DNS service. Generally, people seem to complain that their origin DNS servers are quite slow. I have observed that every once in a while, I do get quite slow DNS resolution of … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

More Python style discussions.

So, I work with a lot of code that likes to do stuff like this: def process(some_dict, some_key): sum = 0 value = some_dict.get(some_key, None) if value is not None: sum += value return sum but I find the use … Continue reading

Posted in General | 1 Comment