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 [...]

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. [...]

I’ve really been enjoying working with Python iterators lately. They make working with iterative tasks so flexible. Lately I’ve been working on adding progress tracking to an application so that we can give our users some feedback on where the application is at in various long-running tasks.
Since the long-running tasks in question are [...]

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 [...]

CherryPy Essentials
Author: Sylvain Hellegouarch
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Pages: 257
Introduction
The title CherryPy Essentials is a bit of a misnomer, as this book covers far more than the bare essentials of CherryPy 3. Admittedly, a book on simply the essentials would be little more than a leaflet, as CherryPy is very easy to understand and be productive with. [...]