Book? Second draft (with tech review comments addressed) off to editors.
Boat? Still on the hard during Hurricane Season.
I've had a passing interest in data synthesis for decades.
Early on in my career, I figured out how the Z/OS IEDBG utility worked. See https://www.ibm …
My sailing blog, Team Red Cruising is very large: 859 postings over the last few years. 2,334 image files.
This is a LOT of content.
A few of the files (were) Movies, which tend to create immense files.
The whole mess was so big
How Big Was It?
It …
more ...Consider, for a moment, the shelve and dbm packages for storing things in a “database.” Built-in. Lightweight. The database is essentially a mapping from identifiers to objects. It can be quite nice.
The shelve module directly puts Python objects in a file. It’s an ideal database structure for Python …
more ...I saw a confusing post on https://fosstodon.org.
I won't link to it, but I will quote it because it repeats some common misconceptions.
I have some iterator chain (in reality longer and more complex than this example). And now in one or more steps, I need to add …more ...
First, read this: Hazards And Safeguards for Software Rewrites. This is an infuriating article. The first part is nonsense. I wonder if it's intended to be read ironically? Maybe it's a list of bad ideas? Skip straight to the Safeguards for Rewrites section. It's really good.
Also, this Characterization Testing …
more ...There are many good reasons to use shell scripts. Mostly, a script can be useful when it's an alias that launches an application. Beyond that, I have doubts.
Incumbency is a popular argument for bash.
It's not a good argument, however.
Use invoke and you'll be much happier.
I wasted three days because I refused to get a grip on how matplotlib really works.
Most of the time, folks like me are happy and successful using the pyplot module. The Quickstart provides brilliant, working examples.
As my partner's grandfather used to say, "We're off to the races in …
more ...I'm sick of reading about THE Ternary Operator.
There is not merely a single operator that is ternary. There are many operators that are ternary.
Here's one example:
>>> 6+1 >= 6 >= 6-1
The >= >= operator is ternary. It has 3 operands. Count them.
There are a 36 of these ternary operators …
more ...Stand-alone document files for tech writing are awful. They should not be used as widely as they are.
We used to call editors like MS-Word WYSIWYG -- What You See Is What You Get. Once upon a time, an editor that immediately presented the final rendered doc …