Category Archives: Python

Spruce up your desktop with the National Geographic Photo of the Day

[Update, 2011-02-24] Reader Jason Coombs kindly made the necessary changes to get this working on Windows 7! Now I might be shamed into getting it working for Mac OS X as well His changes are here. I’ve updated my script … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop, Programming, Python | 7 Comments

Review of Hacking Vim 7.2

Hacking Vim 7.2 by Kim Schulz is filled with a variety of useful explanations and helpful tips for Vim users wanting to improve their efficiency and learn more about their editor. While I’ve enjoyed finding new and better ways to … Continue reading

Posted in Book Review, Programming, Python, Ruby, vim | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A better way to search for methods of Python objects

Python’s introspection abilities are quite extensive and useful. They are also well-documented, so I won’t go into the basics here. Check out this article if you need a good overview. N.B.: discussion and code below applies to both methods and … Continue reading

Posted in Programming, Python | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Catching warnings from the MySQLdb module

The MySQLdb Python module implements the Python DB API for MySQL. I’ve written about its use before. MySQL issues warning messages in a number of circumstances and PEP 249 (which specifies the Python DB API) describes a Warning error message … Continue reading

Posted in Python | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Checking options with optparse callbacks

optparse is a flexible and powerful module for processing command line options in Python programs. I’ve used it for a while, but I didn’t have much occasion to get into callbacks until recently. A callback here is a user-defined function … Continue reading

Posted in Python | Tagged , , | 2 Comments