Archive for the ‘ General Programming ’ Category

Windowing an iterable with itertools

As any good python developer does, I make heavy use of python’s iterator protocol.  It’s easy, it’s efficient, it’s a good thing.  As you know, an iterator consumes an iterable piece by piece each time “next” is called — which means that the next value cannot be peeked without incrementing the iterator (thus consuming the [ READ MORE ]

Parsing nginx log files

The python group at OASIS has been busy making plone do backflips!  We’ve hooked up several Zeo instances to nginx and varnish — cool stuff.  After the grunt work of digging through config files we faced the problem of how to test our setup; but none of us wanted to do end-user testing for thirty [ READ MORE ]

What is programming?

“So why programming, what is it really?” Programming is writing instructions for how parts make a whole.  Take, for instance, legos.  Remember getting legos for your birthday?  Did you read the instructions or just start building?  To build the lego Millennium Falcon you must assemble thousands of parts according to the blueprint. “Legos are fun, but what [ READ MORE ]

The awesomest simple template – part deux

Ok. So recently I posted some code for a simple templating utility that I wrote. I’ve done some refactoring and have an even cooler version. This version better extends the behavior of string.Template and I’ve found it to be far more intuitive to use.  Without further ado: import string class SimpleTemplate(string.Template): """ [ READ MORE ]

The Simplest Template

Ready for the simplest templating utility ever?  I was trying to prepare some JSON data stored in a tree and needed some simple code to generate templated text.  Below is a wrapper for python’s string.Template class: import string class SimpleTemplate(string.Template): """ Takes a string template and a tuple or list of identifier names [ READ MORE ]

More on balanced ternary — implementing binary search trees

Hi all – so I’ve been busy as hell but that’s ok, there’s always time for some fun.  In my earlier posts I described how one could construct a tree using balanced ternary – it’s implementation time!  Lets begin by creating a really simple binary search tree. [ READ MORE ]

Making hashtables from binary trees

The next time a random guy on the street asks you if binary trees and hash tables are related answer yes, then look at him strange for asking you such a random question.  In all seriousness though, there exists a deep theoretical relationship between the pair of data structure: [ READ MORE ]

Programming For Fun: Introduction to intro Python

I’ve been wanting to teach a course for some time and I am now being afforded the chance.  The target audience are people who have never written a line of code; and what I’d like to do is get people interested in python programming using humor and non-technical metaphor.  After some thought, I roughed out [ READ MORE ]

A curious idea

Ok, so I've been building a BST and all the accoutrements to connect it to the hypertree visualization. But what about balancing the BST? Because I have a math background I decided to forgo (at least for now) building AVL or red-black trees in lieu of a more 'mathematical' approach. What to do? [ READ MORE ]

Working toward the Javascript InfoVis Toolkit

If you haven’t seen this, then go here immediately and consider the possibilities of this toolkit: http://thejit.org/.  The JIT is a javascript library for advanced knowledge visualizations and hot damn its cool.  The only problem is that its in javascript and I’m a python programmer. [ READ MORE ]