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I don’t wanna be hatin’ on IPython, but I don’t use it. I often favor fairly extreme minimalism in computing. Why install something if you can accomplish the same (or good enough) with what you have available? IPython has quite a lot of features and syntactic-sugar, but it is overkill for my needs. Instead I’ve been slowly crafting my ~/.pythonrc.py [...]
I’m working on a project that required a database of video games (name, release date, box-art, etc.). Too much information to input manually, so we began looking for commercial offerings. There are two players in the field: Muze and AMG. It’s quite obvious they realize they have this market cornered, their sales representatives are the most [...]
If anyone else out there is stunned that yesterday’s ISO approval of Microsoft’s OOXML document format was not an April Fool’s joke, James Hogarth has an excellent recap of the entire saga entitled How to buy a standard in 10 days. Unfuckingbelievable. Here’s hoping countries raise formal protests; if not, office document formats will remain incompatible [...]
When I first discovered Dean Allen's Textile I thought it was god's gift to light-weight markup languages. For the next two years I used it everywhere possible, even so much as to write a few school papers (in part) using the syntax. It was trying to use textile for non-web purposes that finally removed my blinders to alternatives.
ReStructuredText is freaking huge so users of lighter-weight markup languages can be easily put off. This is an absolute basics quickref to ReST for those kinds of users. Eye-ball the Closing at the bottom for a bit more perspective. Headers Just use non-alphanumeric characters to underline (or under-and-overline) your heading. It doesn’t matter what you use, just be consistent with the character [...]
I’ve given a lot of thought, lately, to the famous Cool URIs don’t change W3C document. Should URLs end in a slash or not? Should they end in a file-extension or not? (What if you’re serving multiple formats of the same document?) I’ve been using a trailing slash (for, admittedly, no defensible reason: the Django guys [...]
I’ve been a bit unhappy with terminal offerings on OS X since I switched. I’ve spent a bit of time working with each iTerm, GLTerm, xterm, aterm, eterm, but always end up back with Terminal.app because it’s fast and pretty. My wish list has always been speed and anti-aliased fonts. I use Gnu screen for [...]
My thoughts on ways younger users of Vim can speed the editing of multiple files. (i.e. How not to use Vim like Notepad ++.)
