Ian Bicking: a blog

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1. lxml.html

   Over the summer I did quite a bit of work on lxml.html. I’m pretty excited about it, because with just a little work HTML starts to be very usefully manipulatable. This isn’t how I’ve felt about HTML in the past, with all HTML emerging from templates …

2. 2 Python Environment Experiments

   two experiments in the Python environment. The first is virtualenv, which is a rethinking of virtual-python.py, and my attempt to move away from workingenv. It works mostly like virtual-python.py, and on systems where it works (not Windows, nor Framework Mac Python) I think it works considerably better than …

3. FlatAtompub

   A little while ago I decided to whip up a small Atompub server to get my head around the Atom Publishing Protocol. I called it FlatAtomPub because it was just storing stuff in flat files. I’m not committing to that name. It was also a chance to kick the …

4. Re-raising Exceptions

   After reading Chris McDonough’s What Not To Do When Writing Python Software, it occurred to me that many people don’t actually know how to properly re-raise exceptions. So a little mini-tutorial for Python programmers, about exceptions…

   First, this is bad:

   try:
       some_code()
   except:
       revert_stuff()
       raise Exception("some_code failed …

5. 9/11/2007

   So, today is 9/11. I almost missed it. It’s not like it catches you by surprise, you’re not going to forget the date. But it’s just been slipping by for a few years now without much notice.

   As an event it is still very important. History …

6. Doctest for Ruby

   Finally, someone wrote a version of doctest for Ruby.

   Recently I’ve been writing most of my tests using stand-alone doctest files. It’s a great way to do TDD — mostly because the cognitive load is so low. Also, I write my examples but don’t write my output, then …

7. The Shrinking Python Web Framework World

   When I was writing the summary of differences between WebOb and other request objects, to remind myself of web frameworks I might have forgotten I went to the WebFrameworks page on the Python wiki.

   Looking through that page I’m reminded how many framework options there have been. And I …

8. WebOb

   I’ve have it in my head to extract/rewrite parts of Paste lately. Tempita was one example.

   The request and response functions in Paste grew very organically. I wasn’t trying to create a framework, so I studiously avoided anything that might look like a request or response object …

9. DictMixin

   Quite some time ago I gave a little presentation on DictMixin at ChiPy. If you haven’t used DictMixin before, it’s a class that implements all the derivative methods of dictionaries so you only have to implement the most minimal set: __getitem__, __setitem__, __delitem__, and keys. It’s a …

10. Reflection and Description Of Meaning

    After writing my last post I thought I might follow up with a bit of cognitive speculation. Since the first comment was exactly about the issue I was thinking about writing on, I might as well follow up quickly.

    Jeff Snell replied:

    You parse semantic markup in rich text all …

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