Archive for September, 2006

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

Job hunting stories

Story below, taken from Mark Dominus’ “job hunting stories” post cracked me up, because it made for a slightly funnier version of conversations I’ve had with my wife about taking jobs in Seattle and California.
A few years ago I was contacted by a headhunter who was offering me a one-year contract in Milford, Iowa. I […]

No Comments » - Posted in Funny, Programming by dkaz

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

range vs. xrange in Python

I found myself questioning why others are looping using xrange, while I’ve been using the boring, non-x range.
Gotta love the fact that I was able to use the built-in in “help” module in Python to answer this quickly.
>>> help(xrange)
Help on class xrange in module __builtin__:
class xrange(object)
| xrange([start,] stop[, step]) -> xrange object
|
| Like range(), but […]

1 Comment » - Posted in Python, Programming by dkaz

Sunday, September 17th, 2006

Semantic progression

I’m watching “V for Vendetta” and ended up following that movie’s reference of Guy Fawkes to Wikipedia. Eventually I ended up on the “Semantic progression” page - interesting stuff.
Semantic progression describes the evolution of word usage — usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.

demagogue - Originally meant […]

No Comments » - Posted in Movies, History, Off-Topic by dkaz

Friday, September 15th, 2006

High Stakes Poker

This is becoming a video blog - YouTube has changed my life, it seems.
If you’re a poker player, you gotta watch this hand between two great players: Gus Hansen and Daniel Nagreanu.

No Comments » - Posted in Sports, Video by dkaz

Sunday, September 3rd, 2006

Subversion Tip #1: Fixing EOL settings with TortoiseSVN

I checked out my SVN codebase from a Linux box this morning and I realized that I’ve been committing everything with ^M line endings.
I absolutely hate when others do that, so I had to take immediate steps to remedy the issue. Following directions, lifted from Celtix ESB Wiki made sure that I won’t be […]

No Comments » - Posted in Programming by dkaz

Friday, September 1st, 2006

Python CVS module makes it easy

Parsing a CSV file with a simple string.split() was going along swimmingly…

for line in open(”samples/sample.csv”):
title, year, director = line.split(”,”)
print year, title

…until I ran into a double-quoted string in the data file I was parsing. Thanks to Python’s CVS module (which I should have been using all along) […]

No Comments » - Posted in Python by dkaz