Category Archives: Python

Python Module Usage Stats – Feb 2011

Posted on February 28, 2011 by lorg

Here are the top 30 “base modules”, ordered by number of PyPI projects importing them. These results are based on 11,204 packages download from PyPI. Explanations, full results and code to generate them are available below. Continue reading →

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Posted in Python | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Small programming challenge No. 6 – nblocks

Posted on January 25, 2011 by lorg

I came up with this challenge when I had to write a function to divide a sequence to percentiles. I needed this to calculate some statistics over trips for plnnr.com. “This sounds trivial” I thought, and reached for my simple … Continue reading →

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Posted in Challenges, Programming, Python, Statistics | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

One-liner Guitar Tuner in Python

Posted on April 22, 2010 by lorg

On windows, assuming imports are free: import winsound winsound.Beep(220*((2**(1/12.0))**7), 2000) But that’s just because I like to tune to E. If you prefer a more “natural looking” note, you can use A: winsound.Beep(110, 1000) But why choose at all when … Continue reading →

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Posted in Python, Sound | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Visualizing Data Using the Hilbert Curve

Posted on April 17, 2010 by lorg

Some time ago, a coworker asked me to help him visualize some data. He had a very long series (many millions) of data points, and he thought that plotting a pixel for each one would visualize it well, so he … Continue reading →

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Posted in Fractals, Graphics, Math, Programming, Python | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Fuzz-Testing With Nose

Posted on March 30, 2010 by lorg

A few days ago, I found a in my website, plnnr.com. The bug was in a new feature I added to the algorithm. The first thing I did was write a small unit-test to reproduce the bug. With that unit-test … Continue reading →

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Posted in Python, Testing | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Pyweb-il Presentation on Optimization Slides

Posted on March 26, 2010 by lorg

Last Monday I gave a presentation in pywebil on optimization, that’s loosely based on my blog post on the same subject. Here are the slides for that presentation.

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Posted in Optimization, Programming, Python | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Simple SQLObject DB Migration how-to

Posted on March 3, 2010 by lorg

I’ve been using sqlobject for plnnr.com for quite some time now. So far my experience with it has been positive. Although I’ll probably change ORM when I move to django, for now it stays. While it stays, I need to … Continue reading →

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The mathematics behind the solution for Challenge No. 5

Posted on February 26, 2010 by lorg

If you take a look at the various solutions people proposed for the last challenge of generating a specific permutation, you’ll see that they are very similar. Most of them are based on some form of div-mod usage. The reason … Continue reading →

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Posted in Challenges, computer science, Programming, Python | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

And now for something completely different

Posted on November 10, 2009 by lorg

My friend Yuval whom you might already know from the comments here, apparently composed music for the Python Zen. It made me laugh today, and as it’s been a long day, I thought it’s worth sharing here. Especially as it … Continue reading →

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Posted in Humour, Python | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Leaky method references

Posted on November 4, 2009 by lorg

After reading my last post regarding __del__, you should know that __del__ + reference cycle = leak. Let’s say that you do need to use __del__, so you decide to avoid reference cycles. You write your code in such a … Continue reading →

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