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.

This blog has probably been pretty boring lately for those of you who aren’t interested in my technical musings. The main reason for that is because there has been too much junk going on for us these days. I kind of had two options:

Whine about our problems.
Sugar coat our problems.

Ok, so I probably [...]

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 [...]

Big pharma hearts Ohio
If only there was such a thing as “cloud power” - we’d tear solar power up.
cw

I gave a brief presentation on SimpleParse at the ClePy meeting last night.
The presentation slides and a few example files are available on my site.
Matt Wilson shared some cool stuff about IPython and twill.
IPython seems like one of those apps where you can always learn one more time-saving trick. I learned a [...]

I’ve been doing more parsing stuff at work lately. For my latest project I’ve been using the SimpleParse library. It has quickly overtaken PLY as my Python parsing library of choice.
Here’s a simple calculator example using SimpleParse. It does basic arithmetic and allows you to store values in single letter variable names. [...]

Here’s an article from the Economist on foreign policy and the race for the White House.
Foreign policy and the presidential race.
It’s an interesting article, but even more interesting is that the data in the poll came from the organization that I work for. Ok, maybe more interesting is a bit of a stretch. [...]