Basic Python Setup for Windows
I’ve mostly developed on Linux, but I’ve had a need lately to create scripts and such on Windows. It’s a bit different on Windows so I thought I’d write down the things I needed to start out on Windows.
HTML and CSS Caching
Caching is great but can cause lots of problems if you change things and the user doesn’t see those changes. Also during development caching is a bad idea. It’s hard to tell what your doing if you don’t know what is or isn’t cached. To make things more complicated CSS caching is different than HTML caching and isn’t cleaned when you “clear cache” in your browser.
So here are some methods for making sure you HTML and CSS are loaded fresh each time.
XHTML to PDF with CSS and Javascript
There are tons and tons of HTML to PDF type tools out there. For basic HTML with little or no CSS and javascript these are ok. If your using CSS2/CSS3 or javascript for some of your layout, the majority of the tools out there don’t get the job done.
Open Source Benefits Explained
This was a article I wrote in 2004 to explain why I liked the idea of using Open Source programs for a Utah Voting System.
Keith Pettit on Open Source software
“The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. This can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.” –opensource.org
Leaving PHP for a new love; Python over Perl and Ruby
Ok, it’s a corny title. But I had a new project that was primarily a commandline (CLI) application, but also had GUI components. I also needed this to be able to work in Linux and Windows. PHP just doesn’t do the trick for these kind of things.
I’ve got about 8 years of LAMP type programming and still love PHP, but I new PHP wasn’t going to be up to the task for this project. PHP is great for web apps and simple CLI stuff but that’s pretty much it. In the past I’ve created some CLI PHP scripts which work pretty well, but it lacks the power of other launguages. Also there are no viable GUI tools avaiable for PHP which was a requirement for my project. Basically PHP was made to be a web programming language and everything else is a afterthought.