I've revised PyLit to work with Python3. See https://github.com/slott56/PyLit-3 The code seems to pass all the unit tests. The changes include Python3 revisions, plus a small change to handle trailing spaces in a sightly cleaner fashion. This was necessary because I have most of my editors …

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 …

That was challenging.

I rewrote almost all of my Introduction to Programming book into an iBook. Trimmed it down. Refocused it. Changed from Python 2.6 to 3.2. A complete refactoring from which almost nothing of the original book survives except the goals.

Look for it October 1st in …

Once upon a time, Apple offered iBlog. Then they switched to iWeb. Then they abandoned that market entirely.

That leaves some of us with content in iBlog as well as iWeb. Content we'd like to work with without doing extensive cutting and pasting. Or downloading from a web server. After …

First, and most important, Omni Outliner is a super-flexible tool. Crazy levels of flexibility. It's very much a generic-all-singing-all-dancing information management tool.

It has a broad spectrum of file export alternative formats. Most of which are fine for import into some kind of word processor.

But what if the data …

Appleworks (formerly Clarisworks) is software that's been dead meat since 2007.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks#End_of_Appleworks

Which is fine unless you have an old computer with old applications that still works. For example, a 2002-vintage iMac G4 http://www.imachistory.com/2002/ still works. Slowly.

When someone …

It may be helpful to look back at 'How Managers Say "No"' which is about breaking the RDBMS Hegemony.

I got an email in which the simple concepts of "data manipulation" and "persistence" had become entangled with SQL DML to a degree that the conversation failed to make sense to …

A library had unit tests that ran for almost 600 seconds. Two small changes dropped the run time to 26 seconds.

I was amazed.

Step 1. I turned on the cProfile. I added two methods to the slowest unit test module.

def profile():
    import cProfile
    cProfile.run( 'main()', 'the_slow_module.prof' …

Some additional points on using Python 2.7 in a way that bridges the gap to Python 3.2. The steps are small and simple. You can start taking them now.

Recently I suggested that one should always include from __future__ import division, print_function on every module. Always. Every Module …