The WSJ blog of all places has an article about how men and women code (and women do it better).
Apparently, "testosterone-fueled" men tend to write cryptic code without comments, while "touchy-feely and considerate" women tend to write lots of helpful comments and are just all-around nice people.
If you're going to make sweeping generalizations about […]
Paul Graham famously compared programming to painting, claiming that programming in its highest form (i.e. what he calls "hacking") is equivalent to art.
This seems to resonate with a lot of programmers, and not just because it makes us feel better about ourselves to believe that we're really creating art when we code our 83rd login […]
The scenario: I'm packaging a CherryPy server with py2exe, using Mako as my template engine. So I create my exe file, and fire up the app, and get this 500 Mako error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "cherrypy\_cprequest.pyo", line 551, in respond
File "cherrypy\_cpdispatch.pyo", line 24, in __call__
File "main.py", line 210, in index
File "mako\lookup.pyo", line 70, in […]
I recently came across an intriguing model for translation services called ICanLocalize. It's similar to what a lot of translation agencies do, but with a couple of twists:
An "instant" translation service with 15-minute (!) turnaround
Website translation with built-in translation memory.
Translators work from a Web browser using a tool that the service provides.
Good idea for small […]
In a previous post, I wrote about how to count words, characters, and Asian characters using python.
In this post I want to pull that together with code to get a word count from an HTML file.
What needs counting
What needs counting depends to some extent on what you need the word count for, but here I'm […]
Last summer, I launched a new archive site for the Honyaku mailing list.
The site is written in Python using the django framework, with MySQL as the database. I chose MySQL because my tests showed that it was much faster than PostgreSQL at text searching.
Lately, however, the searches have been taking a huge amount of time. […]
In a recent post, I gave some code for counting the top n most frequent words in an arbitrary text file using itertools.groupby.
The code is written in a somewhat functional style. It's short and, dare I say, kind of elegant. But it turns out that this code is quite a bit slower than an imperative […]
itertools.groupby is a great tool for counting the numbers of occurrences in a sequence.
Here are some examples from the interactive interpreter.
A list of numbers
>>> # Create a random list of numbers
>>> from random import random
>>> numbers = [int(random() * 10) for x in range(20)]
>>> numbers
[8, 0, 3, 2, 3, 9, 8, 2, 8, 3, 0, […]
Some time around 1980, my elementary school classroom got a computer. While most of the other kids fooled around playing Hunt the Wumpus, my friend and I found the BASIC manual that came with the computer. We laboriously copied in the code to make a "robot" appear on the screen. After a lot of typos, […]
chardet is a fantastic module for finding the encoding of arbitrary byte strings. You can combine this with a check for a BOM to pretty reliably turn them into Unicode.
Edit: Thanks to Kirit's comment below, I added code to check for UTF-32.
import chardet
def bytes2unicode(bytes, errors='replace'):
"""Convert a byte string into Unicode.
First checks […]
Comments(2)