programming

Hey, cool! Python switch statements.

I love this Netflix blog post about how they use Jupyter notebooks. I’m not an programmer but I do play one at work and I’m partial to using notebooks when I explore. Part of my day job is to develop the system architecture for a long term engineering effort. I fire up a notebook and start playing with AWS micro services. My notes end up with the various cases I test, some notes, some sample data and results.

This example from Dr. Drang is pretty creative. It uses Python’s Itertools to solve a boring math problem in an interesting way.

I’m increasingly fascinated by machine learning. Maybe because it feels like there’s more opportunity for machines to learn than for us meat bags. This Github list was really interesting. Gated Conditional Pixel Convolutional Neural Network using TensorFlow (Demo) Value Iteration Networks using TensorFlow — Best Paper Award NIPS ‘16 (Demo) Flappy Bird using Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep Q-learning) (Demo) LSTM Music Generation with Google Magenta Basic RNN (Demo) Live Captioning using Speech APIs on iOS (Demo) Spotify Artist Search using Speech APIs on iOS (Demo) Convolutional Neural Network using TensorFlow on iOS (Demo) MNIST (of course) on iOS (Demo) MobileNets on iOS (Demo) YOLO on iOS (Demo) Inception on iOS (Demo) Symbolic AI Speech Recognition with iOS 10 Speech APIs(Demo) Video Style Transfer using Torch 7 (Demo) Algorithmia API Photo Colorizer (Demo) Clarifai Information Retrieval for Videos on Android (Demo)

While I do pay for a Slack team account, I also manage a frivolous team with a lot of users on the free plan. The Slack free plans are very generous but can run out of storage space fast and that means no one can share dank memes anymore. This wouldn’t be so bad except Slack does not provide an easy way to delete old file uploads. Here’s a useful Ruby script by James Martinez that uses the Slack API to deletes a specified number of attachments that are old than 30 days.

Python 3.6 adds a new module for creating random values for cryptographic secrets. For example, this call: secrets.token_urlsafe(16) generates this unique string: ‘5t_jLGlV8yp2Q5tolvBesQ’ Now, if only I could get all of my scripts moved off of Python 2.7 I’d be in business.

Pythonista 3 for iOS is now available on the App Store. It’s on sale for $5 as a new purchase. If you love Python or just want to take automation to the next level on iOS, there’s no better app than Pythonista. Version 3 brings Python 3 as well as a huge number of new modules and major reworking of existing features. There are specialized modules for interacting with iOS data sources like Reminders, Calendar and even the motion sensors.

Everything from Todd Ditchendorf is so unique and thoughtful. His groundbreaking app Fluid is known by every longtime Mac user. Todd continues to impress with his new apps too. Schwartz is a vector graphics app that automatically generates templated code in a variety of languages. As with everything under the Celestial Teapot umbrella, Schwartz is also inexpensive at only $10. Here’s a great intro to using Schwartz to create SVG graphics for Safari pinned tabs.

Weeks before my holiday vacation, I refresh a long-standing list — my “things to try” during vacation list. This very Web site began life on that list. This year is no different and I thought I’d share them as I complete them. Today’s post is about the Wolfram Programming Language. I wanted to learn at least the basics of the language because I think it’s one of the most impressive achievements in general-use computing this decade and I knew very little about it.

This post by the good doctor is clever. It’s not clever because he does date formatting in JavaScript.1 It’s clever because he does it by calling a second JavaScript library (Moment.js) stored as a snippet from within another snippet. I usually do my date formatting with Python, but he’s right about the shortcoming with Python or Shell centric snippets. They don’t work everywhere. As of today, there’s a JavaScript engine on every computer I use.