Whoever came up with apport -- the Ubuntu crash-reporting system -- is an unsung genius. Crash reporting isn't anything new, of course, but crash reporting that opens up a ticket in Launchpad and lets you, the user, customise the report and follow the problem-remediation on the web is elegant brilliance. Quality assurance that provides some level ( Read more... )

Has anyone reading this used Scrapy, the Python HTML-scraping framework, programmatically as part of a larger system? I'm interested in using it to replace BeautifulSoup in a project I'm working on which involves extracting specific, XPath-targetable tags from the contents of a whole bunch of different URLs. BeautifulSoup can do it, but the CPU and ( Read more... )

By way of sfllaw, a development paradigm I had not previously known about, and tool for developing in this fashion. Holy shmoley. I agree with Bill Tozier, I want this for Python yesterday ( Read more... )

Prompted by a discussion with bunnykitteh, who's good at prompting these kinds of things ( Read more... )

As some of you know, I have a rather lengthy post in the works about the history of challenges to initiative amendments in California -- that is, constitutional amendments which are proposed by a petition of the people and decided by popular vote. It's 1500 words and counting, and will probably hit 3000 by the time it's done, but I wanted to make ( Read more... )

There's a post up on BoingBoing today (ok, yesterday for me) about open vs. closed search algorithms, suggesting that the search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo et al are bad because of their lack of transparency. It invokes a comparison to an important concept in computer security: "security through obscurity" is dangerous because an effective ( Read more... )

As usual I am probably the last one to notice, but just in case I'm not: Script.aculo.us fucking owns.

Sometime in the reasonably near future I want to arrange, um, everything I have been thinking about in the last week and a half into an essay, the thesis of which is: if you are a Web 2.0 coder, learning Lisp will make you a much better Web 2.0 ( Read more... )

... woot.com had the Roomba Discovery 4220 SE on special yesterday for $150 plus $5 shipping, so I did a little budget-checking and decided it was time to start establishing my robot vacuum cleaner army. (Ever since the Bluetooth-enabled Roomba cockfight at ETech back in March, I've been thinking it would be cool to get a bunch of Roombas and write ( Read more... )