Mashup For Change

I've had so much change this year and have even more looming on the horizon — working hard to finish a book, a baby on the way, and more -- that it seemed appropriate to rework this site a little. So here it is... a fresh and new devurandom.org with even a little extra functionality to boot.

The big things in my life these days are Google (the book), Django (my day job), and Samba (for fun). So I tried to capture a little of all three with the new site design. The colors are (sort of) a mashup of the Django and Samba website colors. The Samba colors (blues and yellows) were taken directly, but the greens were adjusted a bit from Django's site. One, the site is not my own so I didn't want a direct copy, and two, the greens didn't work exactly with the blues without some minor adjustments. I'm more of a coder than a designer, but I think the colors work okay together.

As for Google, I've included bits from the various services I use. The reading page includes my reading list from Google Reader, and the home page includes upcoming events from my Google calendar. I've also got search every where and my tutorial resources.

I'm also playing with ma.gnolia for bookmarks, which I really like so far. Hopefully, the new look and functionality will make me use my site more, and therefore, update it more often. :-)

Link | Posted by deryck on September 25, 2006 | 0 comments

datetime.date Arguments From Tuple

I always forget this, so maybe writing it down will help. When converting strings to time objects, with time.strptime(str, format), you can't pass the tuple directly to datetime.date because each part of the tuple is a positional argument. So, for example, the following fails:

A nice work around is using the star operator.

I'm used to *args and **kwargs when handling arbitrary function arguments and keyword arguments, but the star works nicely to unpack arguments as well. See Unpacking Argument Lists in the Python tutorial for more.

Link | Posted by deryck on September 25, 2006 | 0 comments