http://blog.dowski.com Unfortunately, Christian had a Thwart, and the Magpie stayed in play. Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:34:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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, ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/04/16/converting-docx-files/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/04/12/command-history/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/04/02/reading-chunked-http11-responses/ 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 enjoyed every part of PyCon 2008. I guess I'm easy to please or something. Maybe I just enjoyed getting out of my home/office ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/03/27/my-pycon-2008-post/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/02/13/life-rundown/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/02/13/code-farming/ Big pharma hearts Ohio If only there was such a thing as "cloud power" - we'd tear solar power up. cw http://blog.dowski.com/2008/02/07/ohio-has-been-indexed/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2008/02/05/simpleparse-presentation-and-other-clepy-notes/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2007/12/19/simpleparse-plug/ 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 ... http://blog.dowski.com/2007/11/29/political-plug/