Check out this month's Hacker Monthly. One of my Stackoverflow answers was reswizzled into a short article on class design. That was gratifying.

The question of testing came up recently. The description of the process sounded like manually "testing" some complex web application. When trying to work out manual "testing", I find it necessary to use scare quotes. I'm not sure there's a place for "manual testing" of any software.

I know that …

This is the kind of little program that would be in HamCalc. But doesn't appear to be.

Looking at the Airfoil web page, specifically, this one: http://airfoiltools.com/airfoil/details?airfoil=ls013-il.

The measurements are all given in fractions of the depth of the airfoil. So you have to …

Just a safety note for folks who use a lot of electricity. In the winter, you might have computers and space heaters. Or you might (like me) live "off the grid". We use an inverter with a transfer relay to switch between battery power and grid power. Recently, we had …

For those of us who live mostly off the grid, with inconsistent WiFi through hosts that flake out frequently, Apple's AppStore download protocol is absolutely infuriating. It's the most brittle damn protocol I've ever seen. When there's any disruption, it simply discards the data it has and starts again. How …

An excellent exposition of secure salted password hashing.

https://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm

This was really quite nice. It didn't have a Python version, but the clarity of the exposition makes the Python easy to write.

A few months back, I had this mystery conversation: {filename}/blog/2013/06/2013_06_27-password_encryption_short_answer_dont …

Finally upgraded to Python 3.3.3. The ordinary maintenance release fixed the problem with the previous release.

The previously documented patch ({filename}/blog/2013/10/2013_10_25-mac_os_x_109_mavericks_crashes_python_patch_available.rst) is no longer required.

Time to start incrementally installing all the various add-on components: docutils, PyYaml, Django, Jinja2, SQLAlchemy, etc.

Also, time …

This: Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science.

Recently, I've had a former colleague asking questions about Data Science. See Obstinate Idiocy They -- weirdly -- insisted that the only language that made sense to them was Excel.

My response was a blunt "What?"

The Python vs. R post …

The correct answer is: It Doesn't Matter. In spite of this. (A) The question gets asked. And worse. (B) It gets answered. And people take their answers seriously. As if there are Profound Differences among programming languages. Among Turing Complete programming languages there are few Profound Differences. The pragmatic differences …

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" today.

Python 3.2.4 crashed in odd places. Not all the time. But help() stopped working to give one example.

I upgraded to Python 3.3 (it's about time to do that, anyway.)

It crashed, also. Similar places.

Here's the …