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Posts concerning python

Tools for Writing reStructuredText in Vim

22:43 07 Oct 2012. Updated: 21:55 25 Oct 2012

I switched to writing in reStructuredText in mid-2009, and to writing in Vim in early 2010. Since then I’ve made a lot of tweaks to improve editing efficiency, and eventually collected these in a Vim plugin (and a Python script). The following discussion of that plugin might be of interest to anyone concerned with writing efficiency and/or editor customization.
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Blog Features I Want

22:44 11 Mar 2012

A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.
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Quick & Dirty Book Info Lookup

21:57 06 Mar 2011

I’m still trying to cut down on the number of books I have in my apartment. That still feels wrong, but the shift to ebooks is making it a little easier. Now I’m getting rid of books that aren’t big favorites of mine, weren’t given to me as gifts, and aren’t in the poorly-defined category of “classics I want to keep”.

Because I’m a pack rat and a data geek, I have a hard time getting rid of books if I haven’t recorded the metadata about them I want to record. Unfortunately, I’m not always diligent about noting that info as I read the books, so the majority of the books I wanted to give away or sell were books where I hadn’t done so—and I really didn’t want to go through them one by one.

Modern technology to the rescue…
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sfmagic.org: Stepping Away

22:48 10 Feb 2011

I hate giving up on projects. Especially projects that I’ve spent a lot of time on, that have had some success, and that have come close to being finished without making it the final, crucial steps. I really wanted to get a new version of sfmagic.org written, in Python, with good web development practices from top to bottom, but it’s far past time to let that go.
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Fun with pandoc, Vim, and email

23:52 21 Jan 2011. Updated: 01:35 22 Jan 2011

I’ve mentioned pandoc once before, and it’s again proved rather useful. I’ve been looking for more ways to use it, as I love its core principle (although I naturally wish that it focused on reStructuredText rather than Markdown) of being a comprehensive text format converter. It might at one point be the answer for getting from reST to PDF—something that the current reST tools don’t help me with because I insist on using Unicode, and XeTeX isn’t yet supported. But today pandoc helped with a different task: going from reST to plain text.
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Minor Achievements

20:36 18 Oct 2010

Sometimes it’s the little things that make life better, the small victories in ongoing daily battles.

I recently did an overhead squat at 185 pounds (or about 84 kilos, or 13 stone 3); I weigh a little under 180 (that day, 178 pounds) and so that was a bodyweight overhead squat. It actually represents two achievements, because in order to get the bar into the overhead position, I had to push jerk it from behind my neck to locked out above my head, which counts as my best push jerk ever, albeit an unorthodox one. From the overhead locked out position, it’s down into a deep squat and back up; the harder part for me was going down, as once I was at the bottom it wasn’t hard to keep my balance coming back up.
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Conditionally Adding dict Keys in Python

20:18 12 Oct 2010. Updated: 03:35 30 Dec 2010

I frequently run across the need to add key/value pairs to a dict subject to some condition. The “traditional” version of that pattern looks something like this:

if condition:
    my_dict[key] = value

Because of my stylistic preferences, I don’t like that, and want to do this:

my_dict[key] = value if condition

That doesn’t work, though, because then key will be set to None in the dict, which is an unwanted side effect.
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Metaweb Acquired by Google

23:57 16 Jul 2010. Updated: 01:20 17 Jul 2010

The official announcements are out, and my former employer Metaweb no longer exists. I’m happy that the ideas, and most of the people, have found a home, but it feels strange that the company is no longer a distinct entity. In many ways it makes a lot of sense for Google to end up owning them, and I hope the former-Metaweb-now-Google employees prosper.
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Unit Testing as Game

23:23 15 Jul 2010

One of the great things about unit testing is that you can get into a game-like mode where you make incremental but measurable progress—“flow”, basically—but what if it’s just not similar enough to a game for you?

Install Unit Testing Achievements, a Python package that works with nose, unittest, and Django. Somewhat crazy, definitely hilarious. Some of the achievements themselves are excellent, such as My God, It’s Full of Dots: The suite has at least 2,001 passing tests.

Sadly not yet working is another one I like, Heisenbug: Make a passing suite fail without changing anything.

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sabbatical.close()

23:36 16 May 2010

After a highly enjoyable, productive, and extended period, it’s time for me to return to the world of paid work.

I’m quite happy with the things I’ve done during my time off. Many of them are important only to me, but then, it’s been my time off.
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Improving a Python Word Counting Function

13:33 29 Apr 2010

This post could be summarized as “regular expressions are a lot faster than naive for loops”.

I’ve been working on improving the script I use for live wordcount in Vim, partly for performance and partly so that I can package it up as a plugin and share it with other people. Along the way I’ve improved the speed of the script rather significantly, and will go through the key part of that change here.
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Python Flatten/Concatenate Comparisons

23:31 09 Apr 2010. Updated: 15:28 18 Jan 2011

I’m going to compare seven different ways in Python to make one list out of several lists containing different numbers of elements, something that strikes me as a common but not necessarily everyday operation.

The philosophy of Python is that generally there should be one obvious and reasonable way to do things. I really like this philosophy—except when the Python way isn’t the way I prefer, of course.
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Public Projects, Finishing Things, and bitbucket

11:46 06 Apr 2010

I’ve been writing Python fairly steadily for the past couple of years, and a significant amount of that has been for my own projects; Python is what I tend to use to scratch workflow-related itches. That’s great, but many of these projects reach a point short of “finished” when I stop working on them.
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Refactoring, Geeky Enjoyment, and Readability

12:16 05 Apr 2010

Refactoring is rewriting source code while preserving the functionality of that code. I’m currently refactoring my Python script for Subversion status, because I want to experiment with sharing code on bitbucket and it seemed like a reasonable first project to put up there.

Some people hate refactoring, but I often enjoy it. I get a kick out of figuring out how to make code “better”, although that’s often a subjective judgment. In this case, when I opened up the script to have a look at it, I immediately saw a function that I knew I wanted to refactor. I’m amused by the enjoyment I derived from making the fairly simple change.
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A Little More Functional Programming

23:55 25 Feb 2010. Updated: 01:41 26 Feb 2010

After reading Dhananjay Nene’s comment on my post about a functional style approach to the “find longest repeater” problem, I decided to follow the line from that comment and divide the program into functions for finding the longest contiguous block and then for comparing the blocks. Naturally, I wanted to do this without using any variables…
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Minor Foray into Functional Programming

15:56 23 Feb 2010

Last night a friend asked me what functional programming was, and as part of my answer I decided to rewrite a trivial program in the functional style to see what it was like. I did this in Python without using the functional module.
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Some Vim Script Implementation, Testing, and Hackery

23:50 16 Feb 2010. Updated: 00:57 17 Feb 2010

As a result of my porting over jEdit (Jython) macros to Vim, I now have a fair amount of (Python) Vim scripts, and have learned some things about how to set up those scripts. I’ll go through some of that below, and hopefully other people writing Python scripts for Vim will find it useful.
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First Post With Vim

20:05 14 Feb 2010

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hacking away on scripts to customize Vim, replicating the scripts I made for jEdit. I’m more or less done, and this blog post is being written in MacVim. This hopefully means that when I’m done with it I’ll be able to publish it from within Vim, the same as with jEdit.
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The Python Challenge

15:18 04 Feb 2010

The Python Challenge seems like a good way to have fun with Python through puzzle-solving. As with all riddles, it’s important to read the questions carefully…

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Better Word Count in Vim

23:40 17 Jan 2010

I’m currently trying out Vim (again), and have made more progress this time, mainly due to Seth’s help. The key things that have made it better:

  • :set hidden. Absolutely critical, this. Stops Vim from complaining when you try to switch buffers and your current buffer has unsaved changes.
  • bufexplorer. Makes switching buffers a lot easier.
  • A better Python syntax file. I didn’t like the defaults.
  • My own indentation and syntax files for reStructuredText.

Really, though, the key first one was :set hidden. Before that I felt that I had completely misunderstood Vim’s file management model.
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Code Katas

17:26 15 Jan 2010

I really like this idea from Dave Thomas: code katas, small pieces of programming practice involving some repetition. I came by it via Katacasts, a collection of screencasts of people doing the katas. I particularly recommend Gary Bernardt’s String Calculator in Python and Vim. (Which has inspired me to try once again to get past the vim file management issues I have.)

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Python Coding Exercise: Nested Dictionaries

23:54 08 Jan 2010. Updated: 15:26 18 Jan 2011

I’ve been looking at a bunch of coding exercises recently, including the demo for Codility, and recalled an exercise that I came up with as an interview question. It’s not incredibly difficult, but strikes me as a good “real-world” exercise—it’s based on a task I had to perform while working on the discuss functionality for freebase.com.
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Python Optimization Tips

06:34 05 Jan 2010. Updated: 09:41 14 Jan 2010

I came across these on Hacker News recently, and think they’re worth calling out: Python Speed Performance Tips.
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