Posts tagged ‘python’
My RSS failure
June 3rd, 2013 at 10:21 pm by Dr. Drang
Consider this a small blow against publication bias—a post about a failed script. Or a failed idea, anyway. Shortly after Google announced it would be shutting down Reader in July, I started thinking about ways I could sync my feeds without relying on a third-party syncing service. I’m not averse to such services in principle,…
Sidebar affiliate links
May 6th, 2013 at 11:45 pm by Dr. Drang
If you’re reading this on the site rather than through an RSS reader, you’ll see that the sidebar over on the right has changed. Gone are the Flickr photos, which I hadn’t updated since the fall, and the tag cloud, which I doubt that anyone used. In their place are affiliate links to Amazon, the…
RSS subscriber counting in a sane language
April 30th, 2013 at 10:57 pm by Dr. Drang
Recently, both Gabe Weatherhead and Marcelo Somers have tried to use this shell script to get subscriber counts for their RSS feeds. And it failed for both of them. The reason it failed (I think) is because of how it divides subscriptions into different types, counts each type, and then adds the types together. On…
Invoice email generator redux
March 7th, 2013 at 10:46 pm by Dr. Drang
Here’s the reason I wanted to develop the Python applescript library I posted yesterday: a command-line script for automatically generating invoicing emails. The email includes The name and address of the client. A subject line that identifies the project and the invoice number. A body that includes the invoice number, the amount, and the due…
Combining Python and AppleScript
March 6th, 2013 at 10:34 pm by Dr. Drang
You may remember this post from last June, in which I had to rewrite a script that printed out the current iTunes track. The original script was written in Python and used Hamish Sanderson’s appscript library; the replacement was written in AppleScript. I had to do the rewrite because an update to iTunes had broken…
Lucky 13
February 22nd, 2013 at 8:45 pm by Dr. Drang
A couple of days ago, David Sparks tweeted a link to a site that will convert any text message into the equivalent string of ones and zeros. I just sent an email calling a friend a really bad name in binary and it was kind of fun. roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Bin…— David Sparks (@MacSparky) Wed Feb 20 2013…
Python quantities
February 4th, 2013 at 10:01 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve been doing a lot of calculations in both SI and US Customary Units recently. Normally, I can do the conversions at the end of a set of calculations, and the venerable units program works just fine for me. But in my current project, I need to show intermediate results in both sets of units…
Sunday inaugurations
January 21st, 2013 at 10:28 pm by Dr. Drang
I promise this blog isn’t going to be all calendars, all the time, but I saw a NY Times story yesterday about President Obama’s private swearing-in ceremony in the White House. The official swearing-in of Mr. Obama, 51, was just the seventh time in history that a president was sworn in privately before the public…
Completing my Twitter archive
January 17th, 2013 at 9:44 pm by Dr. Drang
My complete Twitter archive became available today (yes, I’ve been checking every day), and I just got done processing it to fit in with my existing archive.1 Here’s what I did. After downloading and unzipping the archive, I had a new tweets directory in my Downloads folder. The tweets themselves are a few levels deep…
Parsing comments
January 16th, 2013 at 9:34 pm by Dr. Drang
Frequent commenter Aristotle Pagaltzis and I had a brief discussion today about comments in baked blogs. We agree that Disqus, which seems to be the go-to system for people who are moving to a baked blog and want to maintain comments, is out of step with the general idea behind static blogging. It’s a service…
