python

Congratulations to Dr. Drang on running the only site I follow that is astute enough to celebrate the birthday of FTP properly.

I learned five things from this 554 word post by Dr. Drang about determining the default browser on OS X. There's a Python library for reading plists There's a Python library for creating temp files that auto-delete The InternetConfig tool is still around in OS X 10.7 Dr. Drang uses AppleScript like I do, as a wrapper for Shell and Python I invested in learning the right scripting language for the distopian future of AppleScript

A great cheat sheet for trying to understand AppleScript after working with Python.

Clark raises a concern over the death of AppScript. I have to say, I’ve never bothered with it so it will not dramatically impact me. I try not to use too many external Python modules. That’s not because I’m a super-engineer. It’s because I’m ignorant, lazy and selfish. I’m ignorant to many of the modules that are available. PyPi is a good resource but the documentation is often lacking (that’s being generous).

It gets better. Clark makes the Match Style command useful with some pyObjC magic.

Nice work by Clark to manipulate text on the pasteboard via pyObjC.

Pyp (short for Pyed Piper) is a project to enable python text processing at the unix prompt. I suck at sed and AWK but I suck less at Python so I think this looks interesting. I wish there was a Windows equivalent to work with CMD commands. If anything could use some help, it’s the Windows CMD interface. The module supports standard Python string processing but also includes some built in variables for accessing strings from the shell.

A great explanation of list comprehensions at DZone. I've used them several times and the linked Python.org explanation was what I used to understand them. I'm not a mathematician or a Programmer but list comprehensions are pretty cool.

I’ve been very happy with the results of my Hazel based blogging engine. 80% of my posts come through this mechanism now.1 In a tribute to Inception this very post was uploaded by this mechanism. As a quick recap, it allows me to blog using Simplenote or Dropbox.3 Hazel watches my Dropbox “Notes” folder for a file tagged with “post”. Once identified, Hazel copies the file to an archive, processes the MultiMarkdown and posts here at Macdrifter.

I'm currently looking at incorporating some more markdown functionality in a few personal Python centric projects I have. There is some interesting stuff in this space. Sundown is a markdown parser for Python and many other languages. Specifically, Misaka is the Python implementation of Sundown. Pyhame is a static html generator for markdown with support for code highlighting. Installation looks simple. Ever2Simple is a Python module for migrataing Evernote documents to Simplenote with conversion to markdown.