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Ian Bicking, Paste, WebOb and WSGI
Wednesday, April 30 2008
Ian Bicking has updated his simple WSGI tutorial to use his new WebOb package. The software running this blog, Burble, owes everything to Ian’s tutorial (in its old version) and the accompanying parts of his Paste project. It is because of these and the simplicity of the WSGI spec that you can have a working Python application server in a few lines.
There are rich pickings in Ian’s blog if you are interested in Python or in web development, or programming in general.
Tags: ian bicking ~ wsgi
Failure to localise can result in death
Monday, April 28 2008
I read this on Language Log yesterday. (Bowdlerised for syndication reasons):
The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure to localize cell phones.
Ramazan Çalçoban sent his estranged wife Emine the text message:
Zaten sen sıkışınca konuyu değiştiriyorsun.
“Anyhow, whenever you can’t answer an argument, you change the subject.”
Unfortunately, what she thought he wrote was:
Zaten sen sikişınce konuyu değiştiriyorsun.
“Anyhow, whenever they are f-ing you, you change the subject.”
She showed the message to her father, who angrily called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. Ramazan went to his wife’s home to apologize, only to be attacked by his wife, her father, and two sisters. He was stabbed in the chest but succeeded in grabbing a knife, stabbing his wife, and getting away. Emine died of her wounds; Ramazan killed himself in jail.
How exactly did this tragedy come about? Turkish has four high vowels, front unrounded /i/, written <i>, front rounded /y/, written <ü>, back unrounded /ɨ/, written <ı>, and back rounded /u/, written <u>. The verb form that Ramazan wrote was sıkışınca, which is a gerund of sıkışmak, literally “to get wedged, to get in a tight spot”, but here with the sense of “to be unable to answer an argument”. What his wife thought he wrote was sikişince, the corresponding form of sikişmek “to f-. The verb stems sıkış “to get wedged” and sikiş “to f- differ only in the backness of their vowels, which is reflected graphically in the presence or absence of a dot. The problem was that Emine’s cell phone was not localized properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <ı>; when it displayed Ramazan’s message, it replaced the <ı>s with <i>s.
Tags: language ~ tragedy ~ localisation ~ dotting your i’sFriday, April 25 2008
Via the marvellous Language Hat, I read about the newly-online World Atlas of Language Structures.
It appears to be a great example of using the web to its fullest, according to this review:
Behind the scenes of any web application is interesting stuff that average users need not worry about, but that is the foundation of usability and extensibility. First a small gold nugget: a downloadable KML file is provided for each page that includes a map. This is a nice touch which really characterizes the great attention to detail that makes using WALS Online such a pleasant experience.
Some sample pages:
Monday, April 21 2008
The Perl community luminaries invest a lot of effort in demonstrating that not every Perl program looks like a garbage heap, that Perl can be as bland and aseptic as Java, that Perl is not necessarily the language that most closely resembles quick-drying shit in a tube, from which you can squirt out the contents into any shape you want and get your complete, finished artifact in only twenty minutes and only slightly smelly.
No, sorry, folks. Not everything we do is a brilliant, diamond-like jewel, polished to a luminous gloss with pages torn from one of Donald Knuth’s books. This line-drawing program was squirted out of a tube, and a fine brown piece of engineering it is.
From here.
Tags: perl ~ mark dominusSetting up a dual head gutsy box with ati
Wednesday, April 16 2008
It took a little while to get a second monitor set up today. I’ve never set up a dual head Linux box before, and I’ve learned a few things in the process:
Still, it takes me back (in a pleasant way) to the days when I had a dual head Mac years ago, with my markup on one display and the rendered result in the other. Although System 7 got it right straight away with no fooling around…
Tags: gutsy ~ linux ~ xrandr ~ ati ~ dual head ~ ubuntuThursday, April 10 2008
In the whole time I’ve been a Gnome user, which would be several years now, I don’t think I’ve ever seen gnome-system-monitor use less then 5% CPU on average.
I have a honking fast box with lots of RAM here, and gnome-system-monitor still registers on its own display. Contrast this with the humble top, which rarely uses more than 1%.
It seems to me that when you actually want a system monitor is when your system is under heavy load. In which case the last thing I want to do is fire up a new app that materially adds to the problem.
Tags: linux ~ gnome ~ oddityPerl vs Python, minor things i
Thursday, April 10 2008
Python has the rather nifty enumerate for those times when you want to iterate over a sequence with an index:
>>> l = ['spam', 'eggs', 'spam']
>>> for (i, j) in enumerate(l):
... print i, j
...
0 spam
1 eggs
2 spam
I’m enjoying reawakening those dormant brain cells where the Perl lives, but I miss these little niceties.
Tags: python ~ perlWednesday, April 02 2008
The Ruminator now knows about words and phrases. From now on, it can tell you about the “district court”, “helen clark”, and the “human rights commission”, instead of jumbling those words up into clark commission court district helen human rights. This took a bit of work, because even the best statistical analysis produces somewhat dodgy results. I have jiggered things so that I get a list of suggestions with each day’s run, but it’s just not safe to automate it.
I have also written a bit more about how the whole thing works, and where I need help.
Tags: the ruminatorRendered at 2010-03-14 17:54:27