Where there is a Will

I have an idea germinating that involves using fuzzy logic, something I only had a passing knowledge of. After reading the Wikipedia articles and Googling for it I'm more informed but still haven't found a perfect resource.

The only Python code I have found was informative, but it was from way back in 1990. If there are any Pythonistas who know of a more up-to-date fuzzy logic module, or fuzzy logic resource in general, please let me know!

I was debugging an issue with our Django app at work today; an admin.py file wasn't being picked up, and nothing was appearing in the admin pages. It turned that an ImportError was being thrown in the admin.py and Django was interpreting this as the file not existing.

I'm assuming that the reason for this is that Django uses __import__ to import the module, and catches ImportError's if the admin.py doesn't exist. The trouble with this is that if admin.py does exist, and throws an ImportError of its own, Django will also interpret that as a missing admin.py – which can be misleading. continue reading…

I've been thinking a lot about ego lately, and how it applies to software development. Writing software – like any other human endeavor – is influenced by the need to be recognized and hopefully praised for our work. I am no different; it is most likely ego that drives me to release open source software and to refine it even when there is no direct benefit to be had for that work. In this respect, ego is beneficial as it compels me to writer better code, but in the context of a day-job work, ego is a liability. continue reading…

This morning was not a typical morning. After today I rather think I prefer typical mornings.

I woke up a little earlier than usual – at about half past seven – and rolled over in bed, only to be struck with a unpleasant sensation of dizziness. The only time I have felt similar, is when I had gotten drunk on vodka as a teenager.

The room was spinning when I opened my eyes, giving me waves of nausea. I staggered out of bed, only to flop down on the floor because I was afraid of losing my balance. After a few minutes I managed to focus and get back on my feet, only to hug the floor again when the dizziness returned a couple of minutes later. continue reading…

I figured I would write-up some of the features of Django Techblog, the blogging application I wrote to power this site. It does most of what you would expect from a blogging app, but there are a few features that it does differently. The main difference is extended markup, but there are a couple of other features that worthy of note:

The code for Django-techblog is licensed under my politeware license, which means you can use it for any purpose you see fit, but I would appreciate a thank you! It shouldn't be too difficult to set-up if you have worked with Django, but I'd be happy to help if you experience any problems with it. See the Google Code page for the SVN url:

http://code.google.com/p/djangotechblog/

I figured I'd start a series of Python challenges in my blog. Whenever I've posted questions such as these in the past, the discussion that follows is always very entertaining!

A discussion arose today at work about the best way to flatten a tuple consisting of values and other tuples (which may be nested arbitrarily). So the tuple (1, (1, 2, (1, 2, 3), 3)) would become (1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 3). Now there was actually code implemented which was functional, efficient and easy to read – but where is the fun in that?

I figured I could re-write it in a more terse manner, and here is what I came up with:

This flatten function would actually work in the context of our app, but I would never use it in production code. My challenge today, is to tell me why this code should never be used!