This weekend: the HRVA Civic Hackfest. http://guestlistapp.com/events/86160

Alt Daily coverage.

Some more references.

What's it all about? Code For America.

Exploit the information we have to make civic improvements. Ask any journalist who wrestles with government data. There's transparency (i.e., lip service) and there's transparency …

Check this out: http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting.

It's a side-by-side comparison of PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby. I'm not sure why, but it seems sort of cool.

Things like "offside rule" to describe indentation in Python are confusing at first. The "regions which define local scope" section on Python makes precious …

I got a long list of requirements from a firm that's looking to build a related family of web sites. They were down to a Django vs. Ruby-on-Rails decision.

As you can see, they've done their homework in thinking through their needs.

I grouped their "high-level requirements" into several categories …

Looks like fun: Mid-Atlantic Developer Expo. June 27-29 2012 in Hampton, VA. Got a nice reminder through the 757 Labs mailing list. Community is a good thing.

Tweeted by @brennandunn: Why Software Development Estimations Are Regularly Off.

"In reality, most projects worth doing are not repetitions of previous things."

Thank you for that.

If it has been done before -- same problem -- same technology -- then we should be able to clone that solution and avoid creating a software …

The multiprocessing module includes a generic Process class, which can be used to wrap a simple function.

The function must be designed to work with Queues or Pipelines or other synchronization techniques.

There's an advantage, however, to defining a class which gracefully handles generator functions. If we have Generator-Aware multi-processing …

PDF files aren't pleasant.

The good news is that they're documented (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html).

They bad news is that they're rather complex.

I found four Python packages for reading PDF files.

• http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/ - weak
• http://www.swftools.org/gfx_tutorial.html - depends on binary …

The advantage of multiprocessing is to have multiple processes working on a problem. If we break a big problem into small, concurrent steps, we can often get results in less elapsed time by making more effective use of the CPU. Specifically, we want to make use of non-user time where …

See Apache Log Parsing for the background.

Here's a generator function which expands a simple Access to be a more detailed named tuple.

Access_Details= namedtuple( 'Access_Details',
    ['access', 'time', 'method', 'url', 'protocol'] )

def details_iter( iterable ):
    def parse_time_linux( ts ):
        return datetime.datetime.strptime( ts, "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z" )

    def …