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  • 1 min read

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.

  • 1 min read

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.

  • 1 min read

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!

  • 1 min read

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

  • 1 min read

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.

  • 1 min read

Ruff: A Modern Python Linter for Error-Free and Maintainable Code – Real Python

Link: Ruff: A Modern Python Linter for Error-Free and Maintainable Code – Real Python: "Ruff is an extremely fast, modern linter with a simple interface, making it straightforward to use. It also aims to be a drop-in replacement for other linting and formatting tools, like Pylint, isort, and Black. It's no surprise it's quickly becoming one of the most popular Python linters."

The linked article goes in depth about ruff. Everyone loves ruff. Ruff is written in rust. Everyone loves rust. I think that last part is weird. Rust is a cool and interesting language but it is also pretty low level. Sure, for the user, rust programs tend to be very fast. But for the programmer, it’s more work and harder than… pick your language - python, ruby, java, swift… I mean why aren’t we all asking for programs written in c or assembly even? Anyway, I digress.

  • 1 min read

✂Templatemaker

Link: ✂Templatemaker: ""

Attached is a handy site for creating templates for boxes and other containers. There are numerous of these. But this one is pretty nicely done.