Another overview of the - too many - package managers.

Another python “improvement” by providing a Rustlang implementation of a python thing. My thought: “if we keep going down this path, python will become no more than a rustlang preprocessor”😊

A quick glance at this taught me a few useful things from the inscrutable, confusing, and still irreplaceable powerful world of CSS.

Attached is a long article about a single, but useful reminder: you can use ssh to execute remote commands.

While I am on the topic of coding apps for kids, here's another useful list I found.

I was looking for an idea for an educational game for a 7 year old. I came across this article (attached) which has some good links.

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.

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

Flourish is a pretty amazing tool. Can’t wait to try it myself. Just click on the links and try it out.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The attached article takes a fairly contrarian view, basically advocating that all ruby methods should be public unless they have side effects. I can't say I agree with this, but his analysis is a good read and has some good insights.

Attached another huge collection of resources relating to robotics. There are some other libraries like this. This makes it difficult when you are searching for one thing or another. Still I thought I would include this here because this is a goldmine!

You might find something useful in the attached article. The big one for me is the explanation of what the -m flag does.

Attached is an insightful article showing the craziness of the government using apple messenger as the basis for going after apple for anticompetitive behavior. Put in historical context, it makes no sense!

The attached essay by Paul Graham gives his views on how someone can think about finding the right project to work on. Not a job but work that is their own. I love this quote: “What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for”. I’m personally familiar with “a degree that would bore most other people”.

Quick glance at this site gives me the impression that this is a plausible alternative Wikipedia for less exhaustive explanations for how stuff works.