After reading Bob Ippolito’s excellent Playing with PyPy I was inspired to try PyPy out myself. I heard a ton of buzz coming out of PyCon that PyPy is wicked fast and wicked awesome. I wanted to take a look, and Bob’s instructions were a perfectly made intro. A lot of the work I do is [...]
For my own curiosity I created a python + R script to grab the MITRE leaderboard and graph it. It’s a bit of python to grab the leaderboard and write out some CSVs. Then a bit of R code (updated link: http://a.libpa.st/4KFGq) generates the graph. It’s running automatically with launchd on my laptop, and it should [...]
My illustrious former colleague Ryan is now over at MITRE doing operations research and who knows what. He pointed me toward the MITRE Challenge. The MITRE Challenge™ is an ongoing, open competition to encourage innovation in technologies of interest to the federal government. The current competition involves multicultural person name matching, a technology whose uses [...]
I’m a fan of puzzles, programming and learning, so I’ve always enjoyed The Python Challenges. Recently my coworkers Delia, Chris and I came up with the idea of doing some of those within the company to help ourselves and our coworkers become more familiar with Python and R (and to a lesser extent SQL and [...]
As everyone is well aware, lunch is the most important part of the work day. However it’s often hard to find inspiration when deciding on a delectable dining destination. The ideal solution is to have someone propose options, and everyone reject them until consensus is reached. However nobody enjoys that. Computers can propose options, but [...]
The ever impressive Jamie wrote a nice little paste bin at work a while back. It was dead simple to use, relatively private (in that it used UUIDs and didn’t have an index), and hooked into pmxbot. Unfortunately like most of the code written internally it used a proprietary web framework that’s not open source. [...]
My employer just open sourced a fork of the IRC bot we’ve been using internally for years, pmxbot. jamwt and some others are responsible for all the good parts of it, but I’ve been responsible for most of the feature bloat for the past few years. The open source version strips out internal code that [...]
I had to crunch some data today, and decided to experiment a bit. It mostly involved lots and lots of Levenshtein ratios. On my laptop it took over 25 minutes to complete a single run (45k rows, several thousand calculations per row) – a bummer when you want to quickly iterate the rules, cutoffs, penalties, [...]
A couple weeks ago my coworker mentioned PiCloud. It claims to be “Cloud Computing. Simplified.” for python programming. Indeed, their trivial examples are too good to be true, basically. I pointed out how the way it was packaging up code to send over the wire was a lot like Pyro‘s Mobile Code feature. We actually [...]
At work we use the Trac wiki/ticket/software dev management system. I have ended up as its primary maintainer here. We’ve had a few developers leave, and Trac had lots of tickets orphaned with the ex-employees as owner or polluting the CC list. I whipped together a python script using the XML-RPC plugin from trac-hacks. It [...]