the occasional occurrence

I’m working on an OOXML implementation in Python and found this handy utility for converting docx files to rtf.
Docx2Rtf
It seems to open docx files that Word complains about, but at least it let’s me know that I am on the right track. Also, it runs under Wine on Linux, so there is no need [...]

Since all the cool kids are doing it …
Work laptop

christian@yga-dowski:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ |sort -rn|head
82 sudo
68 vim
51 ls
49 cd
48 exit
20 hg
16 rm
16 ipython
14 py.test
10 ping

Apparently I do a lot of exiting. I just started using Mercurial for local revision control, hence the presence of hg.
Dev server
(where [...]

For work today I wanted a way to iterate over an HTTP response with chunked transfer-coding on a chunk-for-chunk basis. I didn’t see a builtin way to do that with httplib. It supports chunked reads but you have to specify the amount that you want to read if you don’t want it to [...]

WARNING: this is YAPAP (Yet Another Post About PyCon), and a late one at that. Click to read more, else move along fair netizen.

I read a good article that gave an Organic Metaphor for software development. Here is a quote:
As I look at what I actually do in my cramped little cubicle, I realize that my work is more akin to farming than construction. I spend my days cultivating information, and growing a program. I can see [...]

In the spirit of sharing knowledge that will save someone from the sort of tedious pain I went through the past couple days, here are a few Safari (2.0.4) bugs that I had to work around:
1. No Global Javascript eval()
That’s right. You can’t eval() in the global (window) context. Safari doesn’t allow it. [...]

So I was just reading this techie blog, and when I was mousing over a link about to click on it, all of a sudden this “mini-preview” of the page I was about to click appeared. It didn’t really do anything beneficial - just showed this little thumbnail of the page that I was [...]

I am doing a little “pleasure reading” on Erlang tonight. I thought this was an interesting thing to say about variables:

Variables can only be bound once! The value of a variable can never be changed once it has been set (bound).

Doesn’t that make them constants, and not variables?
cw

So an article about user interfaces on Coding Horror prompted me to say a short piece about Ion*.
When doing serious work on the computer, I always find myself tiling my windows. Overlapping windows are so annoying. And tiling them in an organized manner is even more annoying.
From the article:
Manipulating windows is pure excise– [...]

I think that this blog entry at Coding Horror pretty much nails why I enjoy programming.
At my previous job we took this personality test of sorts called StrengthsFinder that is supposed to help reveal your top 5 strengths. I took it twice and while some of the results varied, I had Learner in my [...]