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.

As there appears to be some interest in branch coverage and the cool testing/metrics/quality tools that can be built upon it, I've proposed a GSOC project to start the ball rolling. (I assume it will start rolling either way, but allowing someone to devote more time to it …

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 …

Here's my thoughts regarding Pycon 2008.

Benefits of conference attending

• Face time with virtual friends - Some people/IT shops invest in established technology provided by big vendors. I've been somewhat disenchanted by the products (and underlying lockin/intentions) of many vendors. Yet open source (for the most part) has provided …

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 …