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.

Here's my notes on Pycon this year. I'm going to throw out a collection of links that may or may not be useful to you. If you weren't able to make the conference, hopefully this list contains a link or two that are new or interesting to you.

• elasticwulf slides …

I recently received the email below. At the risk of starting a flame war, I'm posting my response here.

Hi Matthew,

Sorry to bug you, but I was reading your blog and was hoping you could help me with some advice. I am new to programming and can't quiet make …

I still develop JS in basically the same way I did back in 2001. Back then IE had more of a stranglehold on the browser market, but it was a horrible JS development environment. So one would use Mozilla with the Venkman debugger to make things a little easier, then …

Like many other nerds, my wife got an Asus EEE for Christmas. (ok she isn't a nerd but her husband is). (Ok, maybe she is a nerd since I've been forcing her to using Linux for so long that she doesn't mind too much anymore).

The machine is solidly constructed …

A much as some gnomers don't like python ;), there's some good stuff coming from those that do. Andy Wingo writes of his work to reduce the memory footprint of the Flumotion Media Server. It is linux specific (and somewhat gnome/gtk specific), but if you're looking to profile memory usage …