Quora Scraper

I love Quora. It’s a great site and community. But I started getting a bit concerned how much writing I was doing there which was (potentially) disappearing inside their garden and not part of the body of thinking I’m building up on ThoughtStorms (or even my blogs). Fortunately, I discovered Quora has an RSS feed …

Personal Question

Question : Hey Phil, do you actually do any programming these days? Answer : Yes. Quite a lot at the moment. Though it’s a bit all over the shop. I’m dipping a toe into Android programming. (And, hmmm … Java …. I thought I’d got over my Java hangups by doing a lot of Processing, …

Command 'n' Cursor

I’ve been travelling with my trusty (but ageing) eeepc netbook this last week. There’s much to love about it but it’s starting to feel slow in comparison with my other machine. Increasingly when I use the netbook I try to get away with doing things in a ctrl-alt-f1 shell without logging in to the GUI …

Permutations with Python Generators

Here’s something neat. I wanted to experiment creating different permutations of a collection of items. (In fact I’m working on some code for laying out shapes on a surface.) Prototyping in Python to get my ideas straight I came up with this neat generator solution. def perm(xs) : if xs == [] : yield [] …