On mobile devices, the address bar takes up too much space. Here is how I made it disappear on this blog. This blog is an Octopress blog so I put it in octopress/source/_includes/custom/head.html, but the code html and javascript should work on any webpage.

<meta …

I'm volunteering at my kid's Elementary School to teach eight 45 minute classes. There are various suggested pre-canned courses that one can offer to teach. But I choose to teach a course of my own creation, How to Create E-books. So, I'm currently in the middle of teaching ten 3rd …

Utah Python will be holding the October meeting on Thursday the 13th. We will have two presentations this month. The first will cover profiling of Python applications. The second will cover regular expressions. For someone who threw out the regex hammer from my toolbag, I'm interested in perhaps replacing it …

Can someone please tell me why kindlegen can't handle <pre>?

I have some html:

<pre class="literal-block">
$ python hello.py
</pre>

And kindlegen kindly gives me this?

<blockquote>
  <div align="left">
    <tt>
      <br/>$ python hello.py<br/>
    </blockquote>
  </tt>
</div>

Calibre on the other hand seems a little more pleasant …

tl;dr

Learn markdown, use octopress

Pending shutdown

A while ago, I was informed that my old blogging service would shutting down at the end of 2011. They served me well over the years, but this seemed like a good reason to move on. The first thing I did was …

My trusty r52 switches between a state of 100-200 free megs of memory and no memory on the 40 gig hard drive. Rather than investing in an expensive IBM harddrive (I've heard the BIOS on my machine won't take normal OEM drives), I got a new computer.

Since I'm a …

I'm in the process of moving over to my new laptop. I run into an issue where a shell script (that worked under gentoo) now no longer works. Here's the error

foo.sh: 18: pushd: not found

Since I'm running this as

sh foo.sh

I turn on debugging with …

If you are looking to generate/create/write (but not read) excel spreadsheets from native python (read on linux or macos or even Windows!), then xlwt (a fork of pyExcelerator) is your friend. This library, (and the ancestor) is somewhat unknown, but quite good. The only real problem with using …

For those in the Utah vicinity, and who want to see a cool presentation about python, wiimotes and lasers (or who really like MS products, since most sessions seem dedicated to that), my brother is presenting at Utah Code Camp. It should be a little cooler than the Pycon version …

My brother gave a talk about using python to detect lasers with webcams and also demo'd a prototype of a 3d game with wiimote headtracking. For those who missed the preso, there's now a video up.