Apple's Feckless Download Protocol

For those of us who live mostly off the grid, with inconsistent WiFi through hosts that flake out frequently, Apple's AppStore download protocol is absolutely infuriating. It's the most brittle damn protocol I've ever seen. When there's any disruption, it simply discards the data it has and starts again. How …

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Mac OS X 10.9 and Python 3.3

Finally upgraded to Python 3.3.3. The ordinary maintenance release fixed the problem with the previous release.

The previously documented patch ({filename}/blog/2013/10/2013_10_25-mac_os_x_109_mavericks_crashes_python_patch_available.rst) is no longer required.

Time to start incrementally installing all the various add-on components: docutils, PyYaml, Django, Jinja2, SQLAlchemy, etc.

Also, time …

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Literate Programming and PyLit

Even though I wrote a literate programming tool (PyWeb) I slowly came to realize that it's not very good.

Mostly, I followed the Web/Weave world view and cribbed their markup syntax. It's not bad, but, the PyWeb markup is based on some presumptions about literate programming that were, perhaps …

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