http://halfcooked.com/blog Wherein I write some stuff that you may like to read. Or not, its up to you really. Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:18:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've just upgraded to WordPress 2.6. As I have claims to be a technologist I install and upgrade my blog software using Subversion. An upgrade simply requires issuing an 'svn switch' command and then running the WordPress database upgrade via the page that presents. Usually this works like a charm. ... http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/07/21/shiny-new-engine-v26/ I just read, courtesy of Simon, a great article at the Guardian covering a presentation that Adrian Holovaty gave there last week. Strangely enough I was talking about this with a colleague this very afternoon. My thesis was that data is generated by applications but should be considered independent of them. ... http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/06/11/inspiration/ In case you haven't seen this elsewhere; Call for Papers Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 2nd - 5th December 2008, Sydney, Australia The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a range of operating systems, and related ... http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/05/23/osdc-2008-call-for-papers/ I'm sure I read this somewhere recently, but my scratchy memory and command of Google can't bring it back to me. Is there a Python idiom for accepting either a file name or a file object as a function parameter? The closest I can get is this; def my_function(file_name_or_object): try: ... http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/05/09/opening-a-file-in-python/ I'm having trouble with dates. This can be summed up in a couple of high level issues; 1. Date support in relational databases is insane, or at the best inconsistent. As far as I can tell the ANSI SQL-92 standard defines date, time, interval and timestamp data types. Which doesn't help when ... http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/05/09/trouble-getting-a-date/ This Thursday, the 1st of May, 2008 from 6:30pm there will be a social gathering of the Sydney Python Users Group and any individuals interested in discussing Python, Web, Ruby, Perl etc. Laptops, OLPC's, code review, show and tell etc allowed and encouraged. We meet in the ground floor area next to ... http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/04/30/may-sydney-python-meeting/ As the feedback I got on the daily twitter posts was entirely negative they are gone. Sorry for that folks. It seems that I'll have to write more original content instead, I will see what I can do. http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/04/27/small-administrative-note/ Dodging the rain by ducking into cafes # @alang I'm there. With bells on. # Another skinny cappuccino? Oh alright then. # Getting the barbecue ready? # Preparing the barbecue to burn a load of meat and fish # Powered by Twitter Tools. http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/04/24/twitter-updates-for-2008-04-24/ Off to talk about Feature Driven Development # Powered by Twitter Tools. http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/04/23/twitter-updates-for-2008-04-23/ Making calls, writing down random thoughts # Powered by Twitter Tools. http://halfcooked.com/blog/2008/04/22/twitter-updates-for-2008-04-22/