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For the latest project I’m working on, we’re using Django with Postgres. I was writing some code that had to find a list of objects that weren’t processed yet. The way they were stored in the DB is like so: class SomeObject(models.Model): #some data   class ProcessedObjectData(models.Model): some_object = models.ForeignKey(SomeObject, db_index = True) #some more…

So here I was, trying to write some Django server-side code, when every once in a while, some test would fail. Now, it is important to know that we are using any_model, a cute little library that allows you to specify only the fields you need when creating objects, and randomizes the rest (to help…

Some months ago, I was facing a problem of having to deal with large amounts of textual data from an external source. One of the problems was that I wanted only the english elements, but was getting tons of non-english ones. To solve that I needed some quick way of getting rid of non-english texts.…

A few days ago a friend (x) of a friend (y) showed me and my friend (y) a small app he was developing, that had photos from flickr and picasa. We suggested adding photos from Wikipedia as well, but he (x) said that the photos were too big, and it was too much trouble resizing…

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.

When I look back at various mathematical courses I took, most have at least one theorem that I really liked. Usually I like it because the proof has a surprising trick, sometimes it’s because of the unexpected conclusion, or maybe the unintuitive feel to it. In other cases it’s just the elegance of the proof,…

A few days ago, @edensh mentioned in Facebook beautiful code, and many people gave examples of assembly, while I was thinking of Python. That got me thinking: what is beautiful code for me? So here are my criteria for beautiful code: Readable (also visually pretty) Concise Does something non trivial (usually in an unexpectedly short…

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 blocks function: def blocks(seq, block_len): """blocks(range(5),2) -> [[0, 1], [2, 3], [4]]""" seq_len = len(seq)…

I moved the blog to a new server, and a new wordpress install. It will take me some time to get everything back in order, but once I finish it, I’m going to get back to writing regularly. Stay tuned!

On windows, assuming imports are free: import winsound winsound.Beep(220*((2**(1/12.0))**7), 2000)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)winsound.Beep(110, 1000) But why choose at all when you can go for all of them? [winsound.Beep(220*((2**(1/12.0))**i), 500) for i…