Advogato blog for gobry

20 Mar 2009

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:42:55 GMT

apenwarr Your ternary operator in python is probably ok if you use constants as the return values, but things become messy if they are variables as well:

foo = bar and baz or bad

Then the outcome depends on the value of both bar and baz, and will definitely introduce interesting bugs.

4 Nov 2008

Tue, 4 Nov 2008 15:26:27 GMT

Dear lazyweb,

I have this XUL application that comes with my GPS device (a tomtom go 920), which I run on a macosx box. So far so good, I appreciate their usage of opensource platforms.

However, when I try to use it to update my maps and access a web server over https, I get a certificate error from the application (this is really a mozilla certificate error popup), because it seems that there is no CA installed with it, or that it doesn't use the system-wide certs.

My question: does anybody know how I could install such a certificate in this application? the file layout really looks like the standard mozilla profile layout.

22 Aug 2008

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 05:17:40 GMT

Bored? Why don't you try to solve the icube?

7 Apr 2008

Mon, 7 Apr 2008 21:40:02 GMT

Just did something painful: decided to potentially kill an open-source project I've been working on for some years now. Not enough time and the fact that I'm not a user of my own project anymore: I've been trying to introduce new features from time to time, mostly things I fancied. But the fact is: if you don't scratch your own itches, it's hard to put in enough efforts to turn a proof of concept into a product.

4 Oct 2007

Thu, 4 Oct 2007 09:39:02 GMT

gdvieira: it makes sense to me to have c+' = ć and c+, = ç (which is what I get from the apps I've tested 1 minute ago)

4 Nov 2006

Sat, 4 Nov 2006 19:49:31 GMT

Just started reading the D Programming Language website. Looks too good to be true: efficient language with high level constructs, native support for unittests and design by contracts, direct access to native C APIs... Has anybody here used it for something larger than a toy project, and would like to share his experience?

11 Oct 2006

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:51:35 GMT

gilbou: it looks like whois is doing a wildcard search, which returns these legitimate but dumb entries....

24 Sep 2006

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:10:03 GMT

Pfewww, I really pushed hard to get a new version of Pybliographer out of the door. I'm still amazed at how much one can do alone when using the proper tools. In this case, the proper tool is Python.

Context: my pet project is a bibliography management tool. Its purpose is to help you organise references, search for new material on external databases, help you cite these references in documents,... I've been able to integrate my code with OpenOffice (thanks PyUNO), with LyX (I won't thanks unix pipes on this one), define a proper citation mini-language, put a GUI around part of it (thanks PyGTK) and test some parts of it (thanks, dogtail), send queries to PubMed, Web of Science, CrossRef (thanks Twisted), parse their results (thanks ElementTree), and even package the whole easily (thanks setuptools)!

A while ago, I said that the purpose of pyblio was not to replace tools like EndNote and the like. Maybe I should revise this. Areas where I'd like to push involve reference sharing and fulltext management. I've already a few ideas, but I need to see if the recent features help the project get more traction.

8 Sep 2006

Fri, 8 Sep 2006 03:01:58 GMT

Thanks Raph, and thanks to all of you who posted so many interesting stuff here. It really has been a pleasure to read advogato.

5 Sep 2006

Tue, 5 Sep 2006 04:22:08 GMT

(thanks to the contributors that brought my diary score almost at 3 :-))

Instead of simply documenting how to use pyblio, I've started working on simple demo code that actually use the framework, and are also immediately useful. The first one is an online PubMed to BibTeX converter. Maybe this will help people start using it.