1996 vs 2011 Infographic from Online University (Evolving Newsroom) -- "AOL and Yahoo! may be the butt of jokes for young people, but both are stronger than ever in the Internet's Top 10". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Pandas -- open source Python package for data analysis, fast and powerful. (via Joshua Schachter) The Society of...
STM in PyPy -- a proposal to add software transactional memory to the all-Python Python interpreter as a way of simplifying concurrent programming. I first learned about STM from Haskell's Simon Peyton-Jones at OSCON. (via Nelson Minar) Werner Vogels' Static Web Site on S3 -- nice writeup of the toolchain to publish a web site to static files served...
Tablib -- MIT-licensed open source library for manipulating tabular data. Reputed to have a great API. (via Tim McNamara) Stanford Education Everywhere -- courses in CS, machine learning, math, and engineering that are open for all to take. Over 58,000 have already signed up for the introduction to machine learning taught by Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research. Wearable...
Hippocampus Text Adventure -- written as an exercise in learning Python, you explore the hippocampus. It's simple, but I like the idea of educational text adventures. (Well, educational in that you learn about more than the axe-throwing behaviour of the cave-dwelling dwarf) Pandas -- BSD-licensed Python data analysis library. Building Lanyrd -- Simon Willison's talk (with slides) about the...
Bulbflow -- a Python framework for graph databases: it's like an ORM for graphs. (via Joshua Schachter) Nomograms -- the lost art of graphical computing. (via John D Cook) Web Intents -- adding Android-style Intents to the web. Services register their intention to be able to handle an action on the user's behalf. Applications request to start an Action...
Sorting Out 9/11 (New Yorker) -- the thorniest problem for the 9/11 memorial was the ordering of the names. Computer science to the rescue! Tagger -- Python library for extracting tags (statistically significant words or phrases) from a piece of text. Free Science, One Paper at a Time (Wired) -- Jonathan Eisen's attempt to collect and distribute his father's...
I'm a big fan of the "less code is better" principle, in that I firmly believe the number of bugs in my code is directly related to the number of lines of code I write.
E-Referral Evaluation Interim Findings -- in general good, but note this: The outstanding system issues are an ongoing source of frustration and concern, including [...] automated data uptake from the GP [General Practitioner=family doctor] PMS [Patient Management System], that sometimes has clearly inaccurate or contradictory information. When you connect systems, you realize the limitations of the data in them....
Javascript Trie Performance Analysis (John Resig) -- if you program in Javascript and you're not up to John's skill level (*cough*) then you should read this and follow along. It's a ride-along in the brain of a master. Think Stats -- an introduction to statistics for Python programmers. (via Edd Dumbill) Bolefloor -- they build curvy wooden floors. Instead...
The Open Data Manual -- a HOWTO for organisations wanting to open up data. This report discusses legal, social and technical aspects of open data. The manual can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data — why to go open, what...
Unicode in Python, Completely Demystified -- a good introduction to Unicode in Python, which helped me with some code. (via Hacker News) A Ban on Brain-Boosting Drugs (Chronicle of Higher Education) -- Simply calling the use of study drugs "unfair" tells us nothing about why colleges should ban them. If such drugs really do improve academic performance among healthy...
Seven Foundational Visualization Papers -- seven classics in the field that are cited and useful again and again. Git Immersion -- a "walking tour" of Git inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it. Cf Learn Python the Hard Way or even NASA's Planet Makeover. We'll see more and more tutorials that require participation...
This year brought confusion and chaos in the Java space, continued growth for functional languages due to the attack of multicore, and the usual popularity for all of the dynamic languages we know and love.
Using a bit of Python and the Gephi graph tool, exploring your own Twitter network is a great way to learn about analyzing networks: and the results definitely have a "wow" factor.
Introducing PyXML
In the second Python and XML column, Uche Ogbuji introduces PyXML, the add-on XML library which builds upon Python's core XML support. (Sep 25, 2002)
You need to fork a daemon process on a Unix
or Unix-like system, which, in turn, requires a certain precise
sequence of system calls.
Loghetti: an apache log file filter in Python As announced earlier on my personal blog, I launched an open source project on Google Code called "loghetti". It's written in Python, and is a foundation for what I hope will become a very flexible tool to help admins (myself… read moreBrian K. Jones
Scale(1), Scale(2), ... Scale(n) Ted Neward attempted to pull apart some of the silliness in the debate over scalability with Can Dynamic Languages Scale?. In particular, one of the most important insights is: There's an implicit problem with using the word "scale" here, in… read morechromatic
TIOBE declares Python as programming language of 2007 I really don't know what this means, but here is the page that contains the headline. Further down in the page are a few details regarding the announcement. Here are those details: Python has been declared as programming language of… read moreJeremy Jones
setuptools tip - script creation My last two blog posts on egg-related topics had a title prefix of "easy_install tip". This post is related, but since it's handled with setuptools rather than easy_install, I'm prefixing it accordingly. Have you ever wondered how various packages you… read moreJeremy Jones
TMTOWTDI -> The Right Way to Do It J. David Blackstone has a
pointed journal post entitled The Right Way To Do It
which praises Perl's "There's More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy: TMTOWTDI is anarchy. It scares people who want to keep order by force. Allowing people… read morechromatic
TPT (Tiny Python Tip): Virtualenv Google Group Ian Bicking just created a Google Group for Virtualenv here, and a bug tracker at launchpad for virtualenv here. I also have slides from a talk at Pyatl here Links:
noahgift.com
My O'Reilly Feed
Virtualenv Google Group
Virtualenv Launchpad Bug Tracker
Virtualenv Package Information
Virtualenv Slides Noah Gift