We had a debate party tonight for the Biden-Palin debate. It’s nice to watch it in a group of like-minded people. Taking the Democrat/Republican debate seriously is a bullshit game and I don’t have any desire to bring this farce into my normal life.
After the debate …
I’ll be attending PloneConf this year again, giving a talk about Deliverance. I’ve been working on Deliverance lately for work, but the hard part about it is that it’s not obviously useful. To help explain it I wrote the philosophy of Deliverance, which I will copy here …
So, decorators are neat (maybe check out a new tutorial on them). Descriptors are neat but may seem hard (though they hardly take a long time to describe). Sometimes these two things intersect, and this post describes how.
Here’s an example decorator where this comes up. First, we want …
Roy T. Fielding, author of the REST thesis wrote an article recently: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven. I liked this article, it fit with an intuition I’ve had. Then he wrote an article explaining that he wouldn’t really explain the other articles because, I guess, he wanted a …
I’ve finished renaming pyinstall to its new name: pip. The name pip is a acronym and declaration: pip installs packages.
I’ve also added a small feature intended for Google App Engine users, allowing you to zip and unzip packages in an environment. For instance:
$ pip zip --list In …
I attended PloneConf 2008 recently, to talk about Deliverance. But I’ll talk here more about my observations as a relative outsider to that community. (This post is really written for the Plone community — if you aren’t familiar with Plone this post probably won’t make much sense or …
In an effort to get back on the blogging saddle, here’s a little note on default values in Python.
In Python there are often default values. The most typical default value is None — None is a object of vague meaning that almost screams “I’m a default”. But sometimes …
When people think about web scraping in Python, they usually think BeautifulSoup. That’s okay, but I would encourage you to also consider lxml.
First, people think BeautifulSoup is better at parsing broken HTML. This is not correct. lxml parses broken HTML quite nicely. I haven’t done any thorough …
James Bennett recently wrote an article on Python packaging and installation, and Setuptools. There’s a lot of issues, and writing up my thoughts could take a long time, but I thought at least I should correct some errors, specifically category errors. Figuring out where all the pieces in Setuptools …
Following onto a set of recent posts (from James, me, then James again), Martijn Faassen wrote a description of Grok’s version management. Our ideas are pretty close, but he’s using buildout, and I’ll describe out to do the same things with pip.
Here’s a kind of …