I sure wish I had Shovel when I was doing Fantasy Surfer. I may have gotten more than 3 hours of sleep some nights.
Via Python Weekly
Posts in category Python
Computer Science Degree in a Blog Post
In anticipation of my MacBook Pro arriving I’ve been scouring the web for the software I’ll need to make it useful and usable. I’ve used SFTPDrive for a while on my Windows boxes and when Magnetk came out with ExpanDrive I bought before I even got the MBP.
I love reading blogs of other developers and the really good developers always have highly informative postings. As someone charged with developing plug-ins for Excel to work around firm imposed constraints and the shortcomings of Excel I’m highly interested in finding better ways of dealing with VB6 and its lack of robustness.
In the latest post on the Magnetk blog they make a good case for circumventing WIN32 and using a high level, cross platform language like Python because it’s fun AND it makes good business sense.
As a person who hires developers and contractors I’d like to recommend blog reading as a requirement to obtain a Computer Science degree. Coding in a vacuum and without exposure to the realities of business have given us decades of craptastic solutions to basic business needs (64K line limit in Excel anybody?).
PyCon Tutorial Day
After a long day of travel (it took nearly 90 minutes to get from O’Hare to the Westin in downtown Chicago after a 3.5 hour flight) and not much sleep I’m glad to report in from PyCon 2008.
I’m tired but excited to be in the last of three informative tutorials at PyCon 2008.
I’m still on the fence about my choice of first tutorial. I did the Python 101 which didn’t really teach me much new. I’ve learned most of the hard lessons already. I was torn between that class and the Introduction to SQLAlchemy. I’ve always pretty much hated SQL even though I’m fairly proficient at it. The idea of using something simpler to do Adjacency List Relationships is enticing even though I’m sure there’s a relatively steep learning curve. I’m scheduled to check out “Database development with Jython, SQLAlchemy, and Hibernate” tomorrow even though I have no intention of trying to use either Jython or Hibernate.
The Django Tutorial that Jacob was great. I knew much of what he went over but the opportunity to ask him about how Django deals with linking tables (Many-to-many relationships via an intermediary table) was worth the trip alone. I’ve spent hours digging for solutions to solved problems while learning Django.
As I type I’m digesting four huge pieces of pizza and waiting for Jacob, Adrian and James to start the Code Lab.
A few quick observations before the code lab starts:
1) The WiFi network has been spotty at best. The one absolute requirement for any software conference is working WiFi. Apparently the issues have been caused by people accidentally setting up ad hoc networks.
2) The food is edible but pretty heavy. Some lighter options for dinner may be helpful.
I just heard that they’re calling us up there to get based on while they deal with our code.
Django Code Lab == American Idol
Jacob == Randy
Adrian == Paula
James == Simon
UPDATE:
Jacob posted the slides at http://toys.jacobian.org/presentations/2008/pycon/codelab/. I’m sure they’d be more valuable in context so I’ll try to find the video of the session and add it up here.
One of the most interesting things I took from the session is a really good link which explains Entity Attribute Value modelling. I’ve done this before but only muddled through it. This well documented Wikipedia article should help many people with more complex modelling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-Attribute-Value_model Thanks Adrian
PyCon Soul
So I got my employer to pay for PyCon. I’d have gone anyway but going on someone else’s dime only sweetens the deal.
What I’m most looking forward to (other than not munging stock trade data in Perl all day) is the Django Code Lab. It’s on Thursday before the official start of the conference. It’s pretty uncommon to be able to have one to one interaction with the developers of any major piece of software much less something as broad reaching and widely adopted as Django. I’m pretty sure DHH isn’t doing this sort of thing at the RailsConf.
It’s this kind of flat organization structure and lack of rock star attitude that drew me to Django in the first place.
Thanks to Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Adrian Holovaty and James Bennett for doing this.
E-Text Editor for Python and Django
Manuel at the E-Text Editor forum is asking if E is a decent editor for Django. Any feedback from consistent Django users?
I’ve been using it a lot since it came out of beta and I think it’s usable. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t love to have a shiny new Mac Book Pro running Textmate but that’ll have to wait a bit.
Constraint breeds creativity right?
Dynamic Queries in Perl or Python Anyone?
I spent the first part of this week trying to implement truly dynamic queries in Perl using DBI. While it’s true that you can bind parameters to the where clause of a query, trying to bind a table name to the query has eluded me for some reason. At first it seemed perfectly plausible that I couldn’t be the only person ever to want to do something like this (code recreated from memory so it’s not exactly what I was trying to use):
$table = ‘table_name’;
$type = ‘some_type’;
$id = 123;
$dbh->prepare(“SELECT column1, column2 from schema.? WHERE data_type = ? AND row_id = ?”, $table, $type, $id);
Apparently though, this is not something people try to do or have a need to do. The issue is that the first “?” would be a table name which is a string. Whenever I try to pass a string to $dbh->prepare() it get’s bound with single quotes around it. Now normally that’d be a good thing but there should be some what to switch that off otherwise my query gets executed as:
SELECT column1, column2 from schema.’table_name’ WHERE data_type = ‘some_type’ AND row_id = 123;
At first I figured it’s a Perl thing that I could add to my list of reasons to dislike Perl.
I’m not sure if this is something I could do in Python using one of the many database modules but I’m sure I could get it done nicely in a PostgreSQL function. I’d just rather keep all of the code in once place instead of having to intertwine Perl and PostgreSQL functions.
SQLAlchemy offers something promising in the Constructing SQL Queries via Python Expressions section that I’ll have to check out. Again, having all the code in one file would be optimal since this script needs to get called by cron.