The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting.

While looking for example applications for Python’s multiprocessing module to use in this week’s PyMOTW, someone suggested implementing MapReduce. Below is the simple implementation I came up with (the source is included in the PyMOTW tarball as of version 1.89). Read more at pymotw.com: multiprocessing/mapreduce.html

Part two of coverage of the multiprocessing module includes inter-process communication. If you missed part one, you may want to start there. Read more at pymotw.com: multiprocessing/communication.html

The multiprocessing module includes a relatively simple API for dividing work up between multiple processes. It is based on the API for threading, and in some cases is a drop-in replacement. Due to the similarity, the first few examples here are modified from the threading examples. Features provided by multiprocessing but not available in threading are covered later. Read more at pymotw.com: multiprocessing/basics.html

I toggled a setting in Firefox a couple days ago and its tab/window behavior changed in a way that was exceptionally annoying. It took me a while to to find the now-hidden settings (who removes options only from the UI?) to reset the behavior, so I’m recording it here for next time. I want it to create a new window when an external app tells it to open a URL, and to use a tab when I click on a link that would open a new window from a page I’m already viewing (such as search results).

The pipes module implements a class to create arbitrarily complex Unix command pipelines. Inputs and outputs of the commands can be chained together as with the shell | operator, even if the individual commands need to write to or read from files instead of stdin/stdout. Read more at pymotw.com: pipes

What’s new? New features include pre and post operation hooks for operations involving virtualenvs (so you can do things like install your favorite common packages every time you make a new virtualenv), navigation functions for working inside the environment, and a host of fixes and optimizations. Check the release log on PyPI for a complete history of the updates. In the ~2 weeks since I’ve uploaded virtualenvwrapper to bitbucket, I’ve received more patches than in all the previous time I maintained the script.

Earlier this week I uploaded all of the history for PyMOTW to BitBucket.org. BitBucket uses Mercurial as its DVCS, and after a couple of hiccups with the initial conversion I’ve had pretty good luck. I think I have the workflow down far managing local changes vs. updates pushed to the central repository. I still need to work out how (and whether) to use branches. I have a sense that I can use local clones in the way I used to use branches: starting an article that was going to take several sessions, without committing the changes to the trunk.

The asynchat module builds on asyncore to make it easier to implement protocols based on passing messages back and forth between server and client. Read more at pymotw.com: asynchat

After several years of tame fish like tetras, we’ve restarted the tank with cichlids. I had both Africans and South Americans many years ago, but we decided to go with Africans this time because we liked the colors and I had the most fun with my Africans before. It took us a while to settle on a theme for their names, but we’ve finally chosen to go with middle names of past United States Presidents.