Apache upgrade
We use the Ubuntu biannual releases as reminder to do backups. Backup; upgrade; work through the bugs. Just upgraded to 13.10 Saucy Salamander without noticing much change. Played with Unity for an...
View ArticleRe-thinking dates
Thinking about how to tackle an up-coming open-data project, I found the impressive RethinkDB. Rather than convert the data on-import into a relational database, I want to load the raw data into a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Exaile as a DJ workstation
Turning This… Exaile, out of the box, is a smart looking multi-platform music player. The Exaile website lists “Simple interface” as its number-one feature, and mentions that it has lots of plugins....
View ArticleClik here to view.
What do chameleons eat?
When this question comes up in a children’s book these days, what do the characters do? Zoe (and Beans) rushes inside to Google it. Which brings me to Mr Christmas and his flying teapot: All you do is...
View ArticleDeadlock: BDD testing a python Tornado app with py.test and Splinter
I’m only a day into my new asynchronous web development project in Tornado, and I already have a deadlock. And this is remarkable, I think, because all I have done so far is a copy-and-paste the Hello...
View ArticleWaiting on the platform
A recent conversation with Lauren Serota reminded me of a challenge we often face building small-to-medium sized digital solutions for our clients: the right platform. We were talking about building...
View ArticleKeeping named files in bash
It just took me way too long to solve this, so I’m going to write it up quickly: The Problem I have a file containing the basenames of spreadsheets that I want to keep in a directory structure. I want...
View ArticleExcel excess: how to remove unwanted styles with VBA
Long story short, I just opened a workbook with 37,000 styles :(. Apparently this is a common problem). Allen Wyatt of ExcelTips suggests deleting non-builtin styles. But I had over 6,000 of those. And...
View Articlepip install rx
I just installed RxPy the Reactive extensions for Python, as you may guess from the title of this article. Well, that was easy. What next? Here’s a delightfully short program which does — ahem —...
View ArticleGetting round the limitations of Excel VBA’s UsedRange function
Turns out that the Excel VBA function UsedRange doesn’t always give the expected results. It gives you the range of cells that have ever been used. If you’ve formatted them, or they used to have values...
View ArticleGet list of worksheets on the command line
Today I need to get a list of worksheets from a very large spreadsheet (~100 worksheets, many thousands of cells on each) quickly from the command line. My ruby script tried to parse the entire...
View ArticleThe Fridge-brilliance of Maybe
I’ve been tinkering with Elm recently. It’s a typed functional programming language that reminds me of the Haskell I wrote during my PhD. And, it’s great fun. I wrote a toy application, and recently...
View ArticleThinking in Elm (and not cutting corners)
So, I’m processing this list of js data which, for this evening, I know contains exactly one thingummy. I’m I want to wire up some Elm and get things to type check before I start to worry about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Elm support compiled into Universal Ctags
I started this project to make vim-tagbar work with Elm. I use tagbar to get an overview of my source files (especially python); I like how it presents the scope of nested tags. I wanted that overview...
View ArticleElm Cambridge first meetup: an overview of Elm
Here are the Prezi ‘slides’ from my talk tonight at the first Cambridge Elm meetup
View ArticleMinimal elm program
This is not the shortest Elm hello world program. But it is about as short as I can make an Html.program. Having written it, and read it, it felt somehow profound. Like a haiku. module Main exposing...
View Article
