IBM

This wasn’t immediately obvious to me even though in hindsight it makes sense. Without putting much thought into my first attempt I numbly typed python setup.py install. My goal, to use both the twitter and the simplejson (a dependency for the twitter api) apis from my Jython scripts. I quickly discovered that to explicitly install these libraries for use in Jython you need to run their setup.py scripts explicitly from Jython. To get started download the src code of the Python libraries that you want to install. ...

I thought that this would be worth posting, I’ve been in need of some Jython code that would help me send out emails with 1 to n files attached to the message. I puttered around my books and a few websites but couldn’t find exactly what I needed. A few failed attempts later I pieced together some working code. Several times I swear some of the Python examples just didn’t work with Jython, the key was figuring out which libraries to import. ...

Last week I was working on understanding a problem and spent a few minutes exploring reflection. My intention was to populate an array of objects and using reflection dynamically find and call the methods that interested me. After digging around Python’s internals for a bit I came up with this. class InspectorGadget(object): def __init__(self, quarrel_with): self.__evil_antagonist = quarrel_with def go_go_gadget_hat(self): ... deploy hat def go_go_gadget_arms(self): ... do that crazy arm thing def meet_penny_and_brain_for_icecream(self): ... magic happens here if __name__ == '__main__': # a list for inspector objects ready to save the world inspector_list = list() inspector_list.append(InspectorGadget("Dr. Claw")) inspector_list.append(InspectorGadget("The Cuckoo Clockmaker")) for inspector in inspector_list: # get a list of the object's public methods methods = inspector.__class__.__dic__.keys() # iterate over the method list & call those that start with 'go_go_gadget' for method in methods: if method.startswith('go_go_gadget'): getattr(obj, method)() Ultimately I discarded this solution in favor of one that fits my problem better but it was definitely a fun digression. ...

I’ve recently had the discomfort of being on the other end of the interview table, the side asking the questions. A couple of warm up questions that I’ve posed to would be candidates left me a bit surprised and underwhelmed. I should note that I personally hate interviews that the interviewer bases success solely on your ability to write the solution that they’re looking for. That said we’d recently gone through a very frustrating bout with a few contractors who claimed they loved to test but also have the handy ability of writing code. There resumes clearly stating that they were very qualified. The last bit we learned quite painfully was an over-exaggeration on their part. ...

Sort Testing I’m futzing with an algorithm to test if a specific sort on a table of n columns and m rows occurs correctly. The problem domain is one where a table can have an infinite number of column headers (n) and an infinite number of sort criteria (n). The first sort criteria specifies the primary sort that the data will be ordered by, each additional sort criteria on the table data only takes effect if two adjacent row items share the same value. ...