1. Installing Python, MatPlotLib & iPython on Snow Leopard.
2. Finding duplicate files using Python.
3. Getting started with Python.
4. Praise for Python.
5. Basic Graphing with MatPlotLib.
6. Graphing real data with MatPlotLib.
7. Extracting image EXIF data with Python.
8. Python 2.7.1 Goodness.
9. Running WordPress on Mac OS X with XAMPP.
10. John Cleese on creativity.

Eight of the top ten are Python related, the top twenty is more diversified:

11. Querying Reddit with Python.
12. Barbara.
13. Processing Perforce command output with Python.
14. Downloading wallpaper images from Reddit using Python.
15. Why scrum fails…
16. Hacking work manifesto.
17. The ascendeancy of JSON.
18. Using Perforce counters to control syncing.
19. Why work doesn’t happen at work.
20. Small steps to big goals.

On a personal note I hope 2012 will bring more posts and less personal tragedy..

• Online Python Exercises
  A good summary of some of the Python exercises available online.  If this interests you also check out my ‘Getting started with Python’ post.
• The New Apple Advantage
  An insightful piece on Apples successful strategy of offering minimal configuration options for its phones, tablets and computers as a way to simplify the buying process and improve revenue.
• Developing Razor Sharp Focus
  Worth it alone for the very useful mind map.  I like his focus on creating rituals, managing email distractions and taking time to reflect and review.
• Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad’s Manifesto
  A very good post on work-life balance for software developers.  I especially liked the following observation: ‘If you screw up at your job you can always get another one, but if you screw up your family, especially your relationship with your children, it will stay with you and stay screwed up forever‘ so many people seem to fail to realise that jobs are temporary but family is forever..
• XKCD: File Transfer (Comic)
  Just why is transferring files still so awkward in this day and age?

• Lawyers: You’re Being Played By Twitter.
  An interesting post about how social media sites like Twitter are exploiting positive feedback loops and gamification to motivate users.
• How HTML5 will kill the native app.
  Does the trend for business to replace native smart device (e.g. Android/iOS) applications with HTML5 web applications mean the days of the native application are numbered?
• Why Can’t Developers Estimate Time?
  This post discusses the issues observed with Developer time estimates and proposes an alternative solution: teaching junior engineers the meaning of ‘done’.
• A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start.
  Rands discussing various strategies for getting started on a project: the hard part being figuring out where to start.
• Four Reasons We Choose Amazon’s Cloud as Our Computing Platform.
  Explaining the reasoning behind NetFlix’s adoption of the Amazon Cloud as its software platform.

• 20 percent time spent coding in the clouds.
  An interesting post by a Google engineering director about how he recently used his twenty percent time developing his first App Engine application on a long haul flight to Japan.
• Do or do not.
  The author has an interesting take on not using asserts in favour of using unit tests instead.  Reflecting on this I find asserts and unit tests essential for C++ projects however for projects in Python I tend to just use unit testing.
• How not to get things done.
  This ironic post makes a case against those engineers with a knack for ‘getting things done’ usually at any price (e.g. gratuitous hacking) can be dangerous to the project.  All engineers require leadership on code quality, testing and maintenance not just those who get things done.
• A Hundred Machines for Only Ten Dollars an Hour.
  An interesting presentation on just how the Amazon cloud makes massive parallel data processing using Hadoop very cheap: $100 in this case.  There is also a warning as the author ends up spending $3000 in legal fees convincing FaceBook that he didn’t do anything wrong with his $100 of data processing!
• How to polish a turd.
  A post about the process of developing and evolving a game concept from conception to shipping.  I have had the opposite experience from the author with publishers being the main source of change requests.
• Are gas prices really that high?
  As a European living in Canada it is easy to appreciate just how much cheap fuel is here.  This graph maps out petrol prices for the whole world relative to the US prices which are even lower than Canada’s prices.
• Time Management (Comic).
  An amusing take on time management blog posts.

• Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss.
  Google’s attempt to use a data-driven approach to management using data gathered from inside Google, it sounds like a pretty promising program.  Usually re-inventing the wheel is a negative pattern but it seems to not be the case for Google on a regular basis.
• Japanese Earthquake: Before and after.
  Some haunting images of the destruction done by the tsunami that was triggered by the earthquake off the coast of Japan.  The use of the slider to compare the overlapped before and after images is very effective.
• Infographic of the Day: A Mind-Blowing History of Sci-Fi.
  An amazing hand drawn infographic on the history of science fiction.
• The Future of Analytics Products.
  A very useful round up of the current Analytics offering and the up and coming new products.
• Built here? No, thanks.
  On why building your own internal game engine may not be a good idea.
• Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers.
  A free eBook about learning probability and statistics for Python programmers.
• Scared Straight. (Comic)
  An amusing look at possible ways to make trouble making kids behave.

• If iPads are “post-pc devices” why must I sync with iTunes before I can use one?
  A very good point given Apple’s recent claims at the iPad 2.0 launch.  I’d love to see iTunes either dramatically improved or removed.
• If you’re not failing you’re not trying.
  A pep talk on failing more, its good for you really
• Why Traffic Jams Happen.
  Admit it you’ve always wondered why, it turns out the reason is very mundane.
• Three Superpowers.
  Rands in Repose talking about three different manager personalities with their own unique superpower!
• Linkedin InMaps.
  Visualise your Linkedin network geographically.
• The need for participation, compassion, & community in the classroom.
  An excellent post about the importance and impact that compassion can have in the classroom and the wider world.
• Do what you say you’re going to do.
  Another inspirational post, I wish I managed this more.

How to broadcast your Google Reader ’starred items’ to an RSS feed or widget on your blog
This post explains how to share your Favorite (starred) items in Google Reader via either an RSS feed or as a widget on your blog.  This is something I am  interested in, as these weekly linkage posts are essential a summary of my starred items in Google Reader for that week.  Although not all my Friday Linkage links come form Google Reader but it would cover most of the interesting blog posts.

Playing in Traffic
David’s well titled post on generating traffic on your website in a classy manner e.g. not through buzz word bingo is well worth a read.  Especially if you are interested in increasing your traffic while retaining your credibility.  His portfolio of photographs is also well worth a browse.

Unit Testing: One Test, One Assertion – Why It Works
This post makes the case for one assertion per unit test.  As relative beginner to unit testing and as someone who tends to have multiple assertions per test I find this an interesting idea which I think I will need to try out.

The Psychology of Passive Barriers: Why Your Friends Don’t Save Money, Eat Healthier, or Clean Their Garages
Ever wondered why people don’t do things that are clearly beneficial for themselves?  This post discusses some of the Psychology of this phenomenon.  Although this is not specifically about software engineering, it is talking about an important aspect of user interaction: motivating/compelling the user to do something.

Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques
This article on Web Analytics discusses four commonly used measurement techniques: averages, percentages, ratios and compound metrics and how they can actually hinder your understanding of your progress against your goals unless they are applied with some thought.

Design Patterns

Design patterns are recyclable solutions to a software design problems and are an essential way to share design experience between designers without each designer having to discover the patterns themselves.  Patterns are not however concrete implementations of solutions like a library they are higher level design concepts and whose implementation should be customised to fit the needs of the situation e.g. if you were to use the same pattern a hunderd times you may well end up with a hunderd different implementations.

Anti-Patterns

Anti-patterns are the opposite of design patterns they describe negative patterns in software design, programming, project management, organisational behavior and other areas of development.  The main focus of anti-patterns is their detection and removal, not their implementation!  Most anti-patterns consist of an definition of symptoms and a guide to refactoring or otherwise removing or reforming the anti-pattern into something more positive.

The Bad Apples: Group Posion

Jeff Atwood discusses the surprisingly dramatic effect that a ‘bad apple’ workers can have on their teams chances of success.  The research his post is based on is quite eye opening, the potential effects of a ‘bad apple’ on a team are much more dramatic than I would have expected.  It is especially interesting to find out that the rest of the team starts to mimic the traits of the ‘bad apple’ after prolonged exposure, which makes an even stronger case for reforming or removing the ‘bad apple’ as soon as they are identified.

NTFS-3G

NTFS-3G is a free NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and some other operating systems.  It allows these operating systems to both read and write to NTFS hard drive partitions used by Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008  systems.

MacFUSE

MacFUSE extends Mac OS X’s native file system to be able to use third party file systems written on top of MacFUSE’s SDK.  Combined with the NTFS-3G driver this allows Mac OS X to finally be able to read and write to NTFS file partitions.  This means that NTFS can finally be used for boot camp and VM ware installations on Macs.

Failure as an indication of progress
This post features a great video about Honda’s Indycar racing experience and how they have an attitude that you have to fail to push the envelope.  This is something I can understand, as I recently started learning to ice skate to play ice hockey.  I noticed quickly that there are two schools of thought about falling: the first is that it is a bad shameful thing and the second is that it is necessary to find out where your limits are.  Without regular failures it is very hard to continue to improve, nothing focuses the mind like working out what went wrong.

Stop bouncing: tips for website success
This post is a great introduction to using the Google Analytics service to guide improvements to your website with the aim of helping to retain visitors to your website.  If you find the article useful I would highly recommend the authors personal Analytics blog ‘Occam’s Razor‘.

Patterns & principles help me sleep!
David’s post about the effects of truely understanding and using design patterns and principles as opposed to memorising them for buzz word bingo purposes.  As I am currently swatting up on design patterns in preparation to teaching a short course about them in two weeks, I found this post fairly encouraging.

Are you throwing away readers by posting at the wrong time?
An interesting post on when to time your blog posting, as someone who already schedules their posts to publish at a certain time (01:00 PST) I found this a quite interesting read and something I will need to think about when I schedule my posts more.

World of Warcraft is the new ‘third place’
It is very interesting to see a computer game being listed as a ‘third place‘, with over ten million players I guess it really is a global community now.

ASP.Net MVC: Release Candidate One
This week Microsoft released an official release candidate for their ASP.Net MVC framework.  Check out this blog post for a list of whats has changed.  ASP.Net MVC has been in beta for a while and I’ve been trying to wait patiently for a more concrete release before trying it out myself.  Mostly so that if I do like it and use it for a project that I then don’t have to do much rewriting if the API changes between beta and release.  So I will hopefully get some time to try this framework out in the next month.

Apanta Studio
Apanta Studio is a web development IDE which is completely free and based on the Eclipse platform.  I was inquiring about a decent php and python editor and had this package recommended to me so it is also on my ever expanding list of things to try out.  It also supports AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS and HTML editing so unless I end up deciding to write my sites in ASP.Net I will most likely be spending a lot of time getting to know this package.

Read the Diffs
Eric makes an interesting suggestion about reading the diffs of the changes your co-workers made the day before every morning.  This sounds like a good way of keeping up with what your co-workers are doing, helping improve code consistency and you may well learn something cool as well.

Can you cure copy & paste disease?
I think any experienced programmer has encountered the horror of a code base that has massive amounts of code copy & pasted around inside it.  Mass usage of copy and paste is generally a bad idea: especially if the person doing it does not fully understand what the code they are copying actually does.  This post discusses the idea of disabling or limiting the usage of copy & paste and if it would improve code quality which is an interesting idea.

Winston Churchill’s Daily Routine
I found this really interesting given all that Churchill achieved during his life to see his daily routine.  Being British he is one of our national heroes for leading the country through the dark years of the Second World War.  I wonder if the routine mentioned in this post covers the years during World War One and Two?