Tuesday, December 8, 2009
I have been trying to install the excellent MatPlotLib graphing module for the Python programming language on my iMac for a while now. Unlike most python module installations I’ve done the excellent python SetupTools (a.k.a easy_install) has not been up to the task. So I ended up using MacPorts (version 1.8.1) to get MatPlotLib (version 0.99.1.1) installed on Snow [...]
Python has had support for SQLite built-in since version 2.5.
This is a very convenient pairing as SQLite is an excellent lightweight SQL implementation that I find very useful for a variety of tasks e.g. data mining. Or any task involving manipulating complex data sets where I’d otherwise end up resorting to using a full blown [...]
The more experienced I become the more aware I become of what I don’t know and the more I come to terms with the fact that I make mistakes.
The awareness of what I don’t know helps keep me humble, humility makes working as part of a team easier: as there is no pressure to have [...]
The ‘Golden Hammer‘ is a very common anti-pattern, which can be best summed up by the phrase “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail“. This anti-pattern occurs when the perpetrator has typically learned a particularly powerful technique or design (the hammer), which they then go on to apply blindly to [...]
I encountered some truly hideous source code today in a programming language in which I wouldn’t have thought hideous obscure code was possible: C#. It was my first real experience of abject horror when looking at the source code of a C# application. Obviously with hindsight it would seem that you can write hugely, dense, [...]