Have You Seen This Cache?
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It looks like syntax highlighting, image thumbnails, and compiling object files.
Let me explain.

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Caching Dictionaries in Python vs. Ruby
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A while ago I made a slightly-underinformed post (see the corrections in the comments) trying to draw a difference between Python and Ruby. I’ve finally got a decent example and can explain what I’m getting at.

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An Academic Inconvenience of Python
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Sometimes Python’s roots in academia bug me. Lots of functions have a computer science feel instead of a software development feel. Here’s an example I just ran into: I wanted to fit as many sentences as possible from a long text into 255 characters. So I wrote:

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One Laptop Per Chicago
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ChiPy held our largest meeting yet at Google (again) last night, so here’s a linkriffic post about it.

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ChiPy at Google
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I had a great time last night at the ChiPy meeting last night that was held at Google’s Chicago office. I suspect a lot of people turned up just to see the venue: usually ChiPy gets 15-20 people but we got 51 last night.

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Ripping Unicode
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some unicode glyphs
I love shoving around large amounts of data. Unicode is an industry standard for encoding data in most every written script there’s ever been. It has over 97,000 characters. A while ago I read about a guy who made his own Unicode poster and I realized I had an opportunity for a fun project. I think Unicode is an invaluable and beautiful project, and this is my tribute to it.

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Ripping Unicode at ChiPy
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Last night at the June 2006 ChiPy meeting I gave a presentation on how I wrote a few small Python scripts to take apart the Unicode PDF of all its glyphs and recombine them into giant ascii-art-like posters.

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Strings are a Domain-Specific Language
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Question: Isn’t a domain-specific language just the same thing as a library?

Source: Pretty much everyone the first time they hear of DSLs.

Answer: No, a DSL is much more than a library, and I have an example that won’t make you say, “Well, sure, if you’re doing something that esoteric…”

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Lambda at Work
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Lambda
Finally, several years after learning lambda expressions, I got a chance to use one at work a few days ago. As long as I’m putting a notch in my nerd belt, I’d like to write about what lambda is and how it can be useful.

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Python Flyweights
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When I wrote Equality for Python, my example didn’t mention how the Card objects could actually be a terrific waste of memory. A commenter named versimilidude (great handle!) beat me to this post, briefly describing the Flyweight Pattern. Luckily he didn’t provide example code, so I still get to publish this post.

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