Articles in the programming category

1. [Python] Empty String?

   Posted on December 01, 2015 in Programming

   I've mentioned before that empty strings in Python are false. This leads to a common if not string paradigm. Unfortunately, this can be problematic. Check out this snippet:

   >>> string = ""
   >>> if not string:
   ...  print("empty")
   ... 
   empty
   

   That pretty much worked out just as we imagined. The empty string returned False and …

2. [Pelican] Don't Let Me Publish Without Committing

   Posted on November 02, 2015 in Programming

   Although I use Git all day long, I actually prefer to use Mercurial for my personal stuff. When I started working on this project to maintain slaptijack.com with Pelican rather than continuing to use Wordpress, one of the things that really interested me was the ability to keep Markdown …

3. Pelican: Insert Article Summaries into WordPress

   Posted on October 26, 2015 in Programming

   This is was my next project.

   Update: For now I've solved this problem by using FeedWordPress to pull the Atom feed for the Pelican-specific portion of the website.

   • Use this as a starting point for the XML-RPC bit.
   • It should first try to pull the article before committing a new …

4. Using Pelican's article.summary

   Posted on October 23, 2015 in Programming

   I'm using Jinja2 templates with my new Pelican-based articles. If you have Django experience, you'll feel right at home using Jinja2 templates. I decided early on that I wanted to create my own theme from scratch and keep it as basic as possible. (In fact, 'basic' is the name …

5. Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license...

   Posted on September 21, 2015 in Programming

   Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

   Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
   

   This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

6. UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019'

   Posted on May 22, 2015 in Programming

   Once again I was working on some Python code for EVE Online. This particular bit of code gathers a list of kills for a particular region and then summarizes that data in a daily report. Everything had been working properly, until one day...

   Traceback (most recent call last):
     File "/Users …

7. [Python] urllib2 with gzip or deflate encoding

   Posted on April 16, 2015 in Programming

   The other night I was working on some Python code that interacts with the zKillboard API. The API call returns kill information via JSON for EVE Online. While making the request, I was getting an error that I was using "non-acceptable encoding." It turns out that the zKillboard guys require …

8. MySQL Multiple-Column Indexes: Order Matters

   Posted on May 18, 2011 in Programming

   This will just be a short reminder. If you're planning to create multiple-column indexes in MySQL, remember that the order of the columns matters. As the MySQL documentation points out, any "leftmost prefix of the index can be used." This means that the index can be used for any number …

9. If Your Post Doesn't Start With An Image, Display an Ad Instead

   Posted on March 08, 2011 in Programming

   I usually start my posts off with an image that is relevant to the post. I think it adds a bit of drama to what I'm writing about, and it also gives me a nice place to anchor a link to a WordPress tag about the subject. I had this …

10. [Python] Convert String Date to Date Object

    Posted on November 09, 2010 in Programming

    Occasionally, you may run across a date in a format that can't be easily loaded into a Python date object. For example, I recently had a situation where a file I was parsing was full of dates in this format: 7/7/2008.

    The obvious thing to do here is …