Post tagged: imported

Infoglut 2013

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • The One Minute Manager- Kenneth Blanchard
  • So Bad, It's Good! - Edward Scimia
  • 100 Bullets, v1-50 - Brian Azzarello
  • Habibi - Craig Thompson
  • Death in the City of Light - David King
  • The Russian Revolution - Rupert Colley
  • Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell
  • Thinking Statistically - Uri Bram
  • The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
  • An Introduction …

Infoglut 2012

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • In the Basement of the Ivory Tower - Professor X
  • Ballad of the Sad Cafe & Other Stories - Carson McCullers
  • The Man Who Killed Channel 9 - Gerald Stone
  • Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
  • Happiness - Richard O'Connor
  • Pashenzade - John Courtney Grimwood
  • Albert Speer: His battle with truth - Gitta Sereny
  • Night Watch - Sergei …

Infoglut 2011

What got past my sensorium in 2011.

Read ...

  • All My Friends Are Superheroes - Andrew Kaufman
  • A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market - John Allen Paulos
  • Jar City - Arnaldur Indridason
  • Dracula - Bram Stoker
  • Surface Detail - Iain M Banks
  • Selfish Capitalism - Oliver James
  • The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam - Chris Ewan
  • Accelerando - Charles Stross
  • Meltdown Iceland - Roger Boyes
  • The Last …

Reducing a sequence to SNPs

A script for a simple task.

A largely self-explanatory script. This will "shrink" an alignment, deleting all sites that don't contain a polymorphism in some member sequence. A little bit of script candy as well, this takes any number of files and saves the results in a new file named according to a definable schema:

#!/usr …

Infoglut 2010

What got past my sensorium in 2010.

Read ...

  • Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional - Peter Cooper
  • Thirteen Against the Dealer - Norman Leigh
  • Mr Timothy - Louis Bayard
  • Two States: the Story of My Marriage - Chetan Bhagat
  • A Sailor of Austria - John Biggins
  • The Monster of Florence - Douglas Preston
  • White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
  • Gaming the Vote - William Poundstone
  • Cheap …

Star Wars names

Demonstrating that the magic truly has left George Lucas.

How can you take seriously a movie featuring a character called "Pash Cracken"? It sounds like something produced by an Australian slang generator. These are all genuine names from the Star Wars movies, harvested from the IMDB or the Star Wars Name Databank:

  • Aks Moe
  • Ask Aak
  • Bultar Swan
  • Captain …

SQLAlchemy merge and relations

In which an oddity in SQLAlchemy is spotted, and it turns out to be a bug not a misunderstanding.

Background

The merge function in SQLAlchemy lets an object seem to get pushed to the database, but actually stores and returns a copy of the object. This is handy for when …

Infoglut 2009

What got past my sensorium in 2009.

Read ...

  • A Pirate of Exquisite Mind - Diana & Michael Preston
  • Rewriting the Soul - Ian Hacking
  • Matter - Iain M. Banks
  • Misquoting Jesus - Bart Ehrman
  • Tournament of Shadows - Karl Ernest Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac
  • More about Paddington - Michael Bond
  • Why Your Life Sucks - Alan Cohen
  • How Would You Move Mt Fuji? - William Poundstone …

Arx cheatsheet

Setting up Arx

arx my-id 'A Cryptic Moniker <moniker@mysite.com>'
    Set up your identity.
arx my-editor vi
    Set your default editor for changing logs etc.
arx make-archive moniker@mysite.com--archive ~/Documents/Arx/Commits
    Set up an archive.
arx my-default-archive moniker@mysite.com--archive
    Make an archive your default.
arx my-revision-library …

Installing git on RHEL3

The hard way

Background

I had to install git on a Redhat server, without the benefit of a package managers, local repository or anything like a sensible configuration. Because "security".

Install a recent version of lib curl

Why? because git calls cur_easy_strerror which was only introduced in libcurl 7.12.0. RHEL3 has …

Infoglut 2008

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trail of Colonel Sweeto & Other Stories - Nicholas Gurewitch
  • Shapeshifter - Geoff Thompson
  • Constructive Living - David Reynolds
  • Y the Last Man (v55-60) - Brian Vaughan
  • Ex Machina (v5-33) - Brian Azzerello
  • Jython Essentials - Samuele Pedroni & Noel Rappin
  • The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller
  • Doubt is Their Product - David Michaels …

Encoding types in etree

Setting encoding in the header of ElementTree generated XML.

Not that I'm picking on ElementTree or anything but ...

Normally XML documents will declare their character encoding in their opening tag. And, normally, this will be utf8. (This may be a standard.) So this is a common sight:

xml version='1.0' encoding='utf8'?>

An oddity in ElementTree is that …

Infoglut 2007

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Planetary n17-25 - Warren Ellis
  • Blankets - Craig Thompson
  • I am Legend - Richard Matheson
  • Tom Strong n1-36 - Alan Moore et al.
  • The Swarm - Frank Schätzing
  • The Undergrowth of Science - Walter Gratzer
  • Watching the English - Kate Fox
  • The Prestige - Christopher Priest
  • Transmetropolitan n1-60 - Warren Elllis et al.
  • Runaways v1 - Brian Vaughan et …

Doxygen cheatsheet

Doxygen is a free tool for documenting code. With a single command it can generate cross-referenced HTML documentation from any C++ or Java code. Furthermore, if the code is commented in a particualr styled, Doxygen can leverage that to enhance the documentation. The below is a selection of the most …

Infoglut 2006

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • The Losers: Ante Up (Volumes 1 & 2) - Andy Diggle
  • Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - David Simon
  • Why Bother? Getting a Life in a Locked-down Land - Sam Smith
  • Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
  • The 100 Simple Secrets of Healthy People - David Niven
  • The Corner - David Simon & Edward Burns
  • A Bear …

Version control systems for Mac OS X

Some quick notes from my search for decent source code control.

This document was originally written in late 2003 / early 2004. The scene has changed some in the meanwhile, with various offshoots of Arch and Subversion gaining a lot of mindshare, and some of the URLs are probably now invalid. However, the broad conclusions still hold, and this is left here …

Installing and using PIL

Overcoming the sometimes tricky installation of the Python Imaging Library and improving image quality.

While some people have reporting installing PIL on MacOSX without problems, there are legion reports that say otherwise. Frequently this revolve around PIL installing without JPEG support. There are a myriad of solutions (involving editing make files, configure flags, using fink to install dependencies, using package managers, casting goat entrails …

Infoglut 2005

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World - Francis Ween
  • The Tick - Ben Edlund et al.
  • Archangel - Mike Conner
  • Watchmen - Alan Moore et al.
  • Stark Raving Rulers - Sean Moncrieff
  • 1602 - Neil Gaiman
  • Authors Choice Monthly - Roger Zelazny
  • Flex Mentallo - Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
  • The Bad Beginning - Lemony Snicket
  • God Save the Queen …

Diagnostic printf

A better basic debugging tool.

The crude "lets drop a print statement in" approach keeps being useful even with advanced dynamic languages. Here's a (slightly) improved version for ruby that pretty prints any number of passed objects and (importantly) where the print call was made from:

def dbg (*args)
   print("dbg: #{caller()[0]}: ")
   args.each …

Infoglut 2004

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Commonsense Rebellion - Bruce E Levin
  • It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be - Paul Arden
  • Revelation Space - Alistair Reynolds
  • The Invisible College - Robert Lomas
  • The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
  • How To Mind Map - Tony Buzan
  • League of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol. 2 - Alan Moore & Kevin …

Slots

A new, and poorly explained, feature of Python classes.

Around version 2.2, Python rejigged its classes with some useful extensions. Unfortunately these enhancements have been explained so poorly that they appear in little published code.

One such enhancement is __slots__. An attribute of this name in a class restricts what attributes can be created in objects of that …

Infoglut 2003

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Downsize This - Michael Moore
  • Anyway - Kent Clark
  • Into the Heart of the Mind - Frank Rose
  • TV Nation - Michael Moore
  • Dreaming in Smoke - Tricia Sullivan
  • Free Lunch - David Smith
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
  • Return of the Straight Dope - Cecil Adams
  • Liquid City - Marc Atkins …

Infoglut 2002

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman
  • The Screwtape Letters - CS Lewis
  • Letters to a Young Contrarian - Christopher Hitchens
  • Undoing Drepression - Richard O'Connor
  • Cosi Fan Tutti - Michael Dibdin
  • Ramses: Son of the Light - Christian Jacq
  • Them - Jon Ronson
  • The Marketmaker - Michael Ridpath
  • The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman et al …

Starship Troopers: a review

A review.

(Way back when, I used to do a lot of SF/F reviews as part of the Postviews site. Eventually Postviews will be incorporated into this site, but until then this star of the series can find a home here.)

I couldn't wait for that smarmy little brunette to die …

Infoglut 2001

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Rocketship Galileo - Robert Heinlein
  • Reeve the Just - Stephen Donaldson
  • My Goodness - Joe Queenan
  • Dead Girls - Richard Calder
  • Kowloon Tong - Paul Theroux
  • No Logo - Naomi Klein
  • Longitude - Dava Sobel
  • Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
  • Creation - Steven Grand
  • Right Ho Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
  • Down Under - Bill Bryson
  • Therapy - David Lodge
  • End the …

Infoglut 2000

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • How to be a Superhero - Mark Leigh & Mike Lepine
  • Dark Life - Michael Ray Taylor
  • All Tomorrow's Parties - William Gibson
  • Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
  • Forests of the Night - Andrew Swann
  • Empire Wilderness - Robert Kaplan
  • Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes - Jonathan Vankin
  • C++ Templates and Tools - Scott Ladd
  • If Pigs Could Fly: Fortean …

Infoglut 1999

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
  • Harms Way - Colin Greenland
  • Amnesiascope - Steve Erickson
  • Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson
  • The Devouring Fungus -Karla Jennings
  • The Psychology of Everyday Things - Donald A Norman
  • Science: Good, Bad & Bogus - Martin Gardner
  • Death March - Ed Yourdon
  • Dinosaurs, Diamonds and Things From Outer Space - David Brez …

Infoglut 1998

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Prozac and the New Antidepressants - William S Appleton
  • Touched With Fire - Kay Redfield Jamison
  • Gaia's Toys - Rebecca Ore
  • Mendel in 90 Minutes - John and Mary Gribbin
  • Strange Days #2
  • Arthur C Clarke's Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious
  • Bizarre Beliefs - Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson
  • The Dictionary of Misinformation …

Infoglut 1997

What I read, saw, listened to or did this year ...

Read ...

  • Maverick - Ricardo Semler
  • Life After God - Douglas Coupland
  • Our Town - Thorton Wilder
  • The Drive-In - Joe Lansdale
  • Lethe - Tricia Sullivan
  • Small World - David Lodge
  • 500 Nations - Alvin M Josephy Jr
  • Disclosure - Michael Crichton
  • Georgia On My Mind and Other Places - Charles Sheffield
  • Signs of Life - Cherry Wilder
  • Reports From the …