I've updated Building Skills in Programming -- an introduction to programming for non-programmers.

The entire thing was redone in RST and Sphinx, leading to an easier-to-read, more colorful layout. The cross-references are generally better and more complete. I also get Sphinx's indexing and search capabilities.

Everything was touched, chapters were added …

Browsers are required to skip over bad HTML and render something.

Consequently, many web sites have significant HTML errors that don't show up until you try to scrape their content.

Beautiful Soup has a handy hook for doing markup massage prior to parsing. This is a way of fixing site-specific …

After installing Python 2.6 in Mac OS X, I had problems with BBEdit not finding the right version of Python. It kept running an old 2.5 version.

I finally tracked down the BBEdit documentation, http://pine.barebones.com/manual/BBEdit_9_User_Manual.pdf.

Found this: "BBEdit expects to find Python …

Ugh. When you try to parse MS-generated HTML, you find some extension syntax that is completely befuddling.

I've tried a few things in the past, none were particularly good.

In reading a file recently, I found that even Beautiful Soup was unable to prettify or parse it.

The document was …

Python's packages and modules are -- generally -- quite elegant.

They're relatively easy to manage. The __init__.py file (to make a module into a package) is very elegant. And stuff can be put into the __init__.py file to create a kind of top-level or header module in a larger package …

I haven't written new C code since the turn of the millennium. Since then it's been almost all Java and Python. Along with Java and Python come JUnit and Python's unittest module.

I've grown completely dependent on unit testing.

I'm looking at some C code, and I want a unit …

On StackOverflow you can read numerous questions on "flattening" nested lists in Python.

They all have a similar form.

"How do I flatten this list [ [ 1, 2, 3 ], [ 4, 5, 6 ], ... , [ 98, 99, 100 ] ]?"

The answers include list comprehensions, itertools, and other clever variants.

[STRIKEOUT:All] Much of which is …

Upgraded a VM to Fedora 11 recently.

This -- it turns out -- comes with Python 2.6 installed.

It is, however, an incomplete build. To do anything, I had to install a some additional Python packages. Specifically, the "libraries and header files needed for Python development". Also, IIRC, the tkinter package …

See this in Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/11/hairy-type.html

They're talking about NodeBox, something I'd never heard of before.

"NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a …

Check out this list of questions from Stack Overflow: [Django] join.

These are all folks trying to do joins or outer joins even though they have objects fetched through the ORM.

How does this confusion arise? Easy. Folks work with SQL as if the relational world-view is Important and Universal …