So, I was at a university the other day, talking with some people about a sprint project, and there was a student there. He was somewhat eager to write “algorithms”. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I was reminded of him because I was just about to …
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App Engine: Commodity vs. Proprietary
I like this phrasing of the debate about App Engine’s role, from Doug Cutting: Cloud: commodity or proprietary? (via). (Well, I like it more than the sharecropping phrasing referenced in my last post.) I guess I’m excited about this because like Doug I do want a “cloud” of …
App Engine and Open Source
This is about Google App Engine which probably everyone has read about already.
I’m quite excited about it. Hosting has been the bane of the Python web world for a long time. This provides a very compelling hosting situation for Python applications.
I’m not as interested in this …
JSON-RPC WebOb Example
I just saw this json-rpc recipe go by as a popular link on del.icio.us. It’s yet-another-*Server based recipe (BaseHTTPServer, XMLRPCServer, etc). I don’t know why people keep writing these. WSGI is in all ways easier, clearer, and more useful.
So I figured I’d give …
Environmental Guilt
I was offhandedly reading this post, which talked about Earth Hour, and about hating on SUVs:
Also thinking of a nice, simple mass-action for discouraging the SUV-ites. Simple, direct; when you see someone driving an SUV, slowly shake your head in disappointment and disgust at the stupidity of the …
Python HTML Parser Performance
In preparation for my PyCon talk on HTML I thought I’d do a performance comparison of several parsers and document models.
The situation is a little complex because there’s different steps in handling HTML:
- Parse the HTML
- Parse it into something (a document object)
- Serialize it
Some libraries …
HTML Accessibility
So I gave a presentation at PyCon about HTML, which I ended up turning into an XML-sucks HTML-rocks talk. Well that’s a trivialization, but I have the privilege of trivializing my arguments all I want.
Somewhat to my surprise this got me a heckler (of sorts). I …
Monkeypatching and dead ends
Bill de hÓra and then Patrick Logan picked up on an old post of mine about monkeypatching.
Patrick’s reply:
I know next to nothing about the specific problems the Ruby and Python folks are encountering with “monkeypatching”. However this capability is nothing new for dynamic languages. And it is …
PyCon Talks
I gave my talk at PyCon this year on HTML processing in Python. It seemed to be well received, but I did see some comments on the web from people who wanted more technical content. The presentation I ended up giving was really more about HTML and its place and …
Runtime vs. Test time
Defenders of static typing have long claimed that it helps them avoid bugs, the compiler providing a constant test of code consistency. Agile practitioners counter that tests do the same thing and much more.
I find myself inclined to something more in the middle. I don’t care for static …