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2024

The Writebook Manual

Link: The Writebook Manual: "A new way to publish a book to the web"

Attached is an elegant new product (at least its prerelease documentation) to “publish a book” to the web. I believe it will be a single license software product that you get to deploy to a server, including a cloud server. There are of course numerous ways of doing this but 37signals.com’s stuff is always excellent and beautiful.

PySimpleGUI – An Intro to Laying Out Elements

Link: PySimpleGUI – An Intro to Laying Out Elements: "PySimpleGUI is a Python GUI that wraps other Python GUI toolkits (Tkinter, PySide, wxPython). By abstracting away the complexities of the other GUIs into a common API, you can quickly write code that can be rendered using any of those other toolkits just by changing the import at the top of your program."

Linked is a package for creating user interfaces with Python. This is just a reminder to myself that it exists. It looks useful.

Episodes.fm

Link: Episodes.fm: "Help listeners follow your show wherever they get their podcasts."

Attached is a really useful tool. Episodes.fm simply searches “all” podcasts, like a google for podcasts. It is really fast!

Ruby: a great language for shell scripts!

Link: Ruby: a great language for shell scripts!: "It’s more than rails!"

I agree. But you know what I really want? A bash code generator. I want to have a tool that lets me create vanilla bash scripts from a higher level language. I’ve come to the conclusion that vanilla bash is in the end the cross platform lingua franca for all kinds of sysadmin type chores and that there’s an art to writing complicated shell scripts. They work great with prompting, defaults, error handling and recovery. But they are a real pain to write, and that they turn out long and complicated and obscure. To paraphrase Philippe Kahn (there’s a really old callout) bash is a write-only language!

phillipe_kahn

My thoughts on Python in Excel

Link: My thoughts on Python in Excel: "An in-depth review of Microsoft's new Python in Excel functionality"

The attached article severely dings the “python in excel” feature that was announced to great fanfare about a year ago. For me the headline is that Python in Excel is NOT a replacement for VBA. Rather it’s better to think of it as a replacement for the excel formula language.