We ran into a problem last week. Our web application produces a lot of documents that have to be accessed frequently for a couple of months… (more…)

Our Ubuntu systems have had a /usr/bin/python that was Python 2 for more or less as long as we've had Ubuntu systems, which by now is more than fifteen years. Over that time, our users have written a certain amount of Python 2 programs that use '#!/usr/bi... (more…)

I was recently involved in a python 2 to 3 upgrade project at work and had a decent experience using pyenv and virtualenv together during development to deal with multiple pythons in a relatively sane way. (more…)

One of my wastes of time is watching celebrity-based British game shows on YouTube. This started with Never Mind the Buzzzcocks, expanded to QI, and now covers a handful of shows, including 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.1 One of the puzzles in this show... (more…)

Timsort is a hybrid stable sorting algorithm, derived from merge sort and insertion sort, designed to perform well on many kinds of real-world data. It was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002 for use in the Python programming language. The algorithm finds s... (more…)