Assertion #1
Occasionally, I have interesting thoughts. It is conceivable that I may, one day, consider some of them to be worth writing down. Time will tell.
View ArticleMore foolishness; now with added drunkenness
Well, it seems my last post was a year ago, and it therefore seems likely that I may actually be dead before I get around to making another. I wish this was a joke.However, with that sobering...
View ArticleDeadly Serious This Time
At 32 Great Queen Street in London, there is a restaurant called -- imaginatively enough -- 32 Great Queen Street. We just ate Sunday lunch there; the confit duck was probably the single best dish I...
View Article.NET Marshalling: a mildly sarcastic Q&A
1) Want to read or write a chunk of unmanaged memory that you know holds a double?Easy! Just use Marshal.ReadDou... oh. Hmm.OK, it seems that -- while doubles work fine in arguments, return values and...
View ArticleSilver Bullets Aplenty
Context: We all know that there's no silver bullet that will slay the metaphorical werewolf embodying the fact that Making Software Is Difficult; we're also familiar with the difference between...
View ArticlePython return dictifier
I wrote this the other week, and thought it was cute enough to share:def _dictify(keys, result): if len(keys) == 1: return { keys[0]: result } return dict(zip(keys, result))def return_dict(keys): keys...
View ArticleAnother snippet
I realised you could do this about a year ago, but I only just found an opportunity to use it.def merge_dicts(d1, d2): return dict(d1, **d2)Satisfying :).
View ArticleSpare batteries for IronPython
As we all know, Python comes with batteries included in the form of a rich standard library; and, on top of this, there are many awesome and liberally-licensed packages just an easy_install...
View ArticleWhere's a plumber when you need one?
Assertion: On Win32, there's no point bothering with subprocess.PIPE -- just use tempfile.TemporaryFile instead.Context: You create a Popen(cmd, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE), and you let it run (with a...
View ArticleThe Joy of Self
I have a distant and fuzzy memory, from back in the day... when I was but a wee slip of a lad, sallying forth to do battle with million-line C++ monstrosities (and just barely escaping with my sanity...
View ArticleA Crime Against Nature
Every so often, while writing Python, I've found myself wishing I could easily dispatch method calls according to the type of the arguments. The urge usually passes quickly, but... oh, the hell with...
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