http://blog.labix.org by Gustavo Niemeyer Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:24:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en After 4.5 years in development, Smart has been branded as 1.0. A big Thank You to everyone who contributed along the years. http://blog.labix.org/2008/08/14/smart-package-manager-10 The underlying concept is very simple: spreadsheets are a way to organize text, numbers and formulas into what might be seen as a natively numeric environment: a matrix. So what would happen if we loosed some of the bolts of the numeric-oriented organization, and tried to reuse the same ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/08/12/wiki-spreadsheet In his post Quantity Always Trumps Quality, Jeff Atwood made a very interesting reference to an arts-related book: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/08/04/write-more-to-write-better As everyone is probably aware by now, in Python 3 dict.keys(), dict.values() and dict.items() will all return iterable views instead of lists. The standard way being suggested to overcome the difference, when the original behavior was actually intended, is to simply use list(dict.keys()). This should be usually fine, ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/06/27/watch-out-for-listdictkeys-in-python-3 Avi Bryant is working on MagLev, a Ruby interpreter, based on Gemstone's Smalltalk VM, with some very amazing features, like transactioned objects distributed across several VMs: The integrated VMs, cache, and storage conspire to create an illusion that global state is shared across all instances: no matter how many VMs you ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/06/01/maglev-and-distributed-vms Today, Sunday, on the mailman day, I decided to change my reading habits. You'd certainly laugh if I told you how many mailing lists, blogs, and IRC channels I try to follow (won't include IM networks here as I don't really read them asynchronously). What I look for is pretty ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/06/01/improving-reading-habits According to Dave Troy, Google seems to be using the Geohash algorithm: Google is employing the GeoHash algorithm I’ve been pushing to do spatial searching using BigTable. Since database schemes like BigTable don’t support traditional GIS extensions/spatial indexes, GeoHash allows for a simple bounding box search using truncated GeoHash substrings. ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/05/20/google-using-geohash Friday I've released version 1.4 of dateutil. There are some interesting fixes there, so please upgrade if you have the chance. http://blog.labix.org/2008/03/03/dateutil-14-is-out Some improvements to geohash.org were made. Some of them were motivated by a conversation with Rodrigo Stulzer. Support for geocoding addresses (city names, whatever). E.g. http://geohash.org/?q=21 Millbank, London Support for moving the Geohash marker in the embedded map, so that modifying the position visually is easier. Support for providing a "name" to Geohashes, by ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/03/01/enhancements-on-geohashorg After about one year writing this service in my spare time, it's finally out. geohash.org offers short URLs which encode a latitude/longitude pair, so that referencing them in emails, forums, and websites is more convenient. Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing ... http://blog.labix.org/2008/02/26/geohashorg-is-public