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Twisted’s Deferred class chainDeferred method is too simplistic?
I think it’s worth spending some time thinking about whether chainDeferred in twisted.internet.defer.Deferred is too simplistic. I’ve thought for a while that it could be more helpful in preventing...
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The first empirical evidence that confusion might be recursive
I spent 4 wonderful years (92-96) at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. During that time there was a very funny underground SFI newsletter “The New Can” (a play on the name of the NM newspaper The...
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Faulkner on splendid failure
I always enjoy running across writing that is not about entrepreneurialism but which seems directly relevant. A couple of snippets that I’ve blogged before are The entrepreneurial spirit in literature...
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jsongrep.py – Python for extracting pieces of JSON objects
Lots of APIs these days return JSON objects. I love JSON, but reading a raw JSON dump can be awkward. You can print the whole thing using pprint in Python (or your favorite language), but what if you...
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py-narrow-to-class
I can never understand when I meet programmers who don’t use emacs. As a programmer, you spend inordinate amounts of time in your editor. You call yourself a programmer. You like to automate things....
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Apple channeling Microsoft?
Image by Lara64Apple’s behavior, as described today in the New York Times and in Ars Technica reminds me of Microsoft building MSIE into Windows. When that happened, other browser manufacturers cried...
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GMZD: Google Maps Zoom-out Distance
Here’s a fun and simple measure of distance between any two locations, A and B. First, find A using Google maps and zoom in (centered) as far as you can go, though don’t go into street view as lots of...
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The eighty six non-trivial powers ≤ 2^20
Tonight Jamu Kakar mentioned in IRC that a program of his had unexpectedly crashed after processing 1,048,376 items. I think it’s a useful debugging skill to have to be able to recognize numbers like...
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Graceful shutdown of a Twisted service with outstanding deferreds
I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking again about queues and services. I wrote a Twisted class in 2009 to maintain a resizable dispatch queue (code in Launchpad, description on the Twisted mailing...
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How to asynchronously exchange a dictionary using Twisted deferreds
Here’s a fun class that I can’t think of a good use for :-) But I like its simplicity and it’s another illustration of what I like to call asynchronous data structures. Suppose you have a producer...
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Back of the envelope calculations with The Rule of 72
Image: internetworldstats.comThe Rule of 72 deserves to be better known among technical people. It’s a widely-known financial rule of thumb used for understanding and calculating interest rates. But...
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A resizable dispatch queue for Twisted
In December 2009 I posted to the Twisted mailing list about what I called a Resizable Dispatch Queue. I’ve just spent some time making a new version that’s much improved. You can pick up the new...
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txdpce: a Twisted class for deferred parallel command execution
I just uploaded a simple Twisted Python class, txdpce, to Launchpad. It’s designed for situations where you have multiple ways of obtaining a function result and you want to try them all in parallel...
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Bob Arno
Image: ABC Tasmania[Written in 2003, this is the 2nd part of the story of a remarkable connection. You'll need to read part one for the set up.] For the last seven years, I’ve kept a web page full of...
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La Storia di San Michele
Image: Villa San Michele[Written in 2003, as the first of a two-part story of a remarkable connection. Here's part two.] Axel Munthe In 1928, Axel Munthe, a Swedish physician living on the isle of...
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Leaving Barcelona
I’m leaving Barcelona on October 19th and have a bunch of stuff I need to get rid of before then. If you’re interested anything below, please let me know ASAP. You’ll need to come pick things up in the...
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The Grapes of Wrath & Occupy Wall Street
I’m reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. I can’t believe it took me so long to finally read it. It’s great. Below is a section I just ran across that I imagine will resonate strongly with...
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Emacs buffer mode histogram
Tonight I noticed that I had over 200 buffers open in emacs. I’ve been programming a lot in Python recently, so many of them are in Python mode. I wondered how many Python files I had open, and I...
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Women’s guide to HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances
Here’s a women’s guide to the most useful HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances. Someone should make and sell a deck of these. 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY 303 SEE OTHER 305 USE PROXY 306...
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Autovivification in Python: nested defaultdicts with a specific final type
I quite often miss the flexibility of autovivification in Python. That Wikipedia link shows a cute way to get what Perl has: from collections import defaultdict def tree(): return defaultdict(tree)...
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