Here's an interesting -- and common -- question.

"... any tools that I could use to create a web scraper that I could use to interact with a .aspx website?

I want to build a tool that will read an input file (e.g. an excel spreadsheet) containing a list of property parcel …

First, let me say that TDD rocks.

Few things are as much fun as (1) writing a test script for a feature, and then (2) debugging the feature incrementally until it passes the test. It's fun because a great deal of hand-wringing and over-thinking is taken off the table.

To …

Making the rounds: Droopy: easy file receiving. Apparently, there were some widely-read blog posts about this. Google "Droopy: A Tiny Web Server That Makes Receiving Files a Snap" to see the buzz.

The point here is that 750 lines of Python code can go a long way. It's a complete …

We do a lot of bulk loads. A lot.

So many that we have some standard ETL-like modules for generic "Validate", "Load", "Load_Dimension", "Load_Fact" and those sorts of obvious patterns.

Mostly our business processes amount to a "dimensional conformance and fact load", followed by extracts, followed by a different "dimensional …

Here's the situation.

A vendor sent us three separate files which need to be merged. 70,000+ records each. They're CSV files, so column position doesn't much matter. The column name (in row 1) is what matters.

I looked at three solutions. Two of which are merely OK. The third …

It seems so simple: use the HTTP Digest Authorization with the Quality of Protection set to "auth".

It's an easy algorithm. A nonce that encodes a timestamp can be used to be sure no one is attempting to cache credentials. It's potentially very, very nice.

Except for one thing: Apache …

Got this question recently.

I’m looking for an HTML editor that fits into my price range (free of course). I don’t need to do anything fancy, just vanilla HTML to run on an Apache server ..., and maybe some PHP down the line. Can you recommend any open source …

Years ago (6? 7?) I did some data profiling in Python.

This required reading COBOL files with Python code.

Superficially, this is not really very hard.

1. Python slice syntax will pick fields on of the record. For example: data[12:14].

#. Python codecs will convert from EBCDIC to Unicode without …

About a decade ago, I discovered the concept of Literate Programming. It's seductive. The idea is to write elegant documentation that embeds the actual working code.

For tricky, complex, high-visibility components, a literate programming approach can give people confidence that the software actually works as advertised.

I actually wrote my …

XKCD - http://xkcd.com/710/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture#Syracuse_function

I remember learning about this as an undergrad at Syracuse University in the 70's and didn't think much of it. It was just "one of those things" that I heard about, and perhaps wrote a homework assignment in …