| tags: web, programming | View Comments
I'm working on the rewrite of Tar Heel Reader and testing it on desktop, iPad, iPod Touch, and IE6-8. I hate manual steps in my edit/test loop. The i* devices are particularly bothersome because I push my changes, pick up the device, hit the home button to wake it up, slide-to-unlock, and then hit the tiny refresh button. There had to be a better way.
| tags: programming, ubuntu | View Comments
To enable access to the CCS PIC18F4550 development board over USB I created a file named /etc/udev/rules.d/myUSB.rules containing:
| tags: programming, links | View Comments
Very interesting piece on learning to program.
| tags: python, programming | View Comments
A sudden change in my teaching assignment to teaching Comp116 Introduction to Scientific Programming in 2 days resulted in a frantic search for Python programming tools that work the same across Windows, OS X, and Linux. The Enthought Python Distribution looks like a really good turn-key solution to having Python + Numpy + Matplotlib easily working on all three but we also need an editor.
| tags: python, random, programming | View Comments
The more I cut back on broadcast news, the happier I become. I first started during the recent election season when the political ads were insane. Then I got fed up with the amateur hour over at WRAL and switched to listening to Jazz with Bob Parlocha on WNCU in the mornings. I took another step today by automatically muting WNCU's stream at the top of each hour when they play NPR news.
I get my news reading the paper and the web where I get to choose what I read. According to a recent Pew Research Report this puts me in with the young hip consumers of news.
I recommend taking a break from the talking heads, you'll be happier for it.
| tags: random, programming | View Comments
I tried Google custom search for my updated site but I was unhappy with the control I had over what got indexed, so I decided to implement my own.
A quick search revealed the awesome Whoosh search library. It is very well documented and super easy to use.
| tags: random, programming | View Comments
Mike Pirnat's post Why I Switched to Blogofile inspired me to give Blogofile a look. The nice documentation and especially the migration strategy from Wordpress inspired me to give it a try.
Now after about 3 days of reading and enjoyable hacking, I've got my site converted with a new theme and color scheme. I'm impressed at how straightforward the conversion has been. I hacked up the wordpress2blogofile.py script to modify the paths (I wanted to change my permalinks) and to insert paragraph tags into the extracted text.
| tags: python, json, javascript, programming | View Comments
Major browsers insist on producing illegal json like
{ 'foo': undefined }
when objects contain an undefined value. It was pretty simple to monkey patch the json module to handle this case. I put the code on gist and include it here:
| tags: python, programming | View Comments
I had two Python objects consisting of nested dictionaries, lists, strings, and numbers. These were the original and an automatically edited version of a JSON data structure we are using in a game. I wanted to make sure the automatic editing did what I really wanted before I wrote it to the live database.
This Python code did the trick.
| tags: dojo, programming | View Comments
Our BigWords project needs Sets which are lists of Games and SetOrders which sequence the Sets. Json References seem perfect for this but the examples I could find online did not conform to my experience with the way it actually works.