"timeat" updated

timeat updated to use the new(ish) Google Time Zone API.

$ timeat haifa
Haifa, Israel: Fri May 23, 2014 22:16
$ timeat paris
Paris, France: Fri May 23, 2014 21:17
Paris, TX, USA: Fri May 23, 2014 14:17
Paris, TN 38242, USA: Fri May 23, 2014 14:17
Paris, IL 61944, USA: Fri May 23, 2014 14:17
Paris, KY 40361, USA: Fri May 23, 2014 15:17

Oh, and there's also a Go version.

Important vs Urgent

This was a lesson I learned a long time ago, maybe other people will find it useful as well.

Look at the chart above, we divide tasks to four categories on the urgent/important dimensions. Let's look at each category:

1. Not urgent and important - this is where you (and most successful companies) should spent your time. This means investing in infrastructure, making your process more efficient ...
2. JFDI. However if you find that most of your time is spent there - you're doing something wrong.
3. Don't bother.
4. This is the big time sucker. Try to avoid at all cost.

Note: "If everything is important, then nothing is." - Patrick Lencioni

See more here, here and here.

Easy statsd metrics decorator and context manager

Easy statsd metrics decorator and context manager statsd is very handy with creating metrics. Here's a decorator and context manager that simplify the usage even more.
Note: If you want to easily test your code, you can use this Vagrant VM.

Running commands via HTTP

Ran asked about invoking commands via HTTP interface. Here's a quick answer I came up with (using Flask).

pypi→u

I was trying to see if there's an annoucement list for Celery (which we use at work) - didn't find it. One thing led to another... and I wrote pypi→u, a service that emails you if there's a new version of packages your interested in.

It run on AppEngine (with some bootstrap sprinkeld on). You can view the source here.

Note that pypi→u is very alpha, handle with care. Suggestions, comments and bug reports are welcomed.

Current email setup: osx + homebrew + sup + davmail + getmail

 At work we have an Exchange server for email (no POP3/IMAP) and most people use Outlook. However I prefer not to use outlook, here's what I came with:

• Sup as email client
• DavMail for POP3/SMTP
• getmail for fetching email
• Homebrew for unix-ish environment (yup, that's OSX for you)

 Setup is a bit complicated, but once you're there - email is a bliss (well, as much as email can be :)

DavMail

Install DavMail from the .dmg. Run it and point it to the exchange server URL and have it expose POP3 and SMTP. See ~/.davmail.properties (though it's easy to configure from the UI as well).

I added DavMail to my "Login Items" so it starts when I login.

Homebrew

See the site for documentation on how to install.

getmail

Install with "brew install getmail". I keep my mail in ~/Mail, see ~/.getmail/getmailrc.

I have a cron job to run getmail every 3 minutes
    */3 * * * * /usr/local/bin/getmail -n -q

sup

sup is based on ruby. I've installed rbenv and ruby 1.9. "gem install sup" should work. (Note that I had trouble linking to ncurses, and had to run "brew link ncurses" before installing sup). See ~/.sup for configuration example.

sendmail

Sending mail is done via the sendmail program that comes with OSX. A bit of configuration is needed though. See /etc/postfix/main.cf and /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

After the above changes, run the following commands:
    sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
    sudo postfix reload

That's it, you should be set to go with a decent email client.

I also use iTerm2, which lets me click on a link on sup terminal and open it

Reading Passwords of OSX Keychain

OSX stores passwords in its keychain, which is sometimes useful when you forget a password. The command line security utility lets you access the keychain, however the output is somewhat cryptic.

Below is a little script to get user and password for a given domain.

    find-pass.py signup.netflix.com

Note you might get an image like the image on the right. Click either "Allow" or "Always Allow".

Dealing with Bad Memory

The family joke is that I was born senile (my joke is that I have 1bit memory). During the years I've developed some methods to help me be be productive with bad memory. Hope they'll help you as well (if you remember them :).

JFDI
That's the most effective method - do it at the moment you remember. It's pretty amazing how many things you can do "right now" without interrupting your flow too much. Once you did it - there's no need to remember.

Make it Impossible to Forget
Yeah, writing things down help - but I forget to look at my lists. However if you make things impossible to forget - then you won't forget. For example if I need to take something to the car, I'll place it at the front door - can't miss it when I go out.

Get Help
May they be electronic or human, get some help. I married a wife with a phenomonal memory, but it's not an option for everyone :) In this digital age you can find a good non human assistent to help you. Hiring a human assitenet doesn't have to be expensive - see Fancy Hands for example. 

Write It Down
We have a saying: "A short pencil is better than a long memory.". Write things down, it'll help you remember when you write then and later you can look them up. I use this blog as an memory of things that worked for me. Other things I use are pinboard, trello, GMail and Google Docs. Everything with a search function in it.
 
Forgive Yourself
You will forget things, learn to live with it. One of the worst things you can do it agonize over the things you forgot. It'll only add stress to your life without helping you to remember.  

Removing "noise" before matplotlib charts in IPython notebooks

By default, IPython notebook prints the value of the last expression. This works fine most of the time but sometimes the result of a chart is a long list of lines which is something you don't want to see - you just want to see the chart. Here are two options to fix this (you can also view the example notebook).

Decorators and Context Managers Workshop

I gave a workshop on decorators and context mangers at work.

Both are very powerful and will change the way you code in Python once you grok them. They mostly allow you to focus on application logic and write the "book keeping" code (logging, timing, resource allocation ...) in a separate place.

Here are the IPython notebooks:

• Context Managers
• Decorators

And the solutions (but try to solve the exercises first):

• Context Managers
• Decorators

 If you want to run locally, the code is here.

Searching and Viewing emoji

We started using emoji at work. We're using Adium with the emoji xtra.

Here's a little script to search and optionally show emojis (requires matplotlib).

Making "pip" Faster

We use pip to install packages at work. Mostly in combination with virtualenv and wheel packages. Lately I had to re-install again and again a bunch of virtual environments and looks for a way to speed things up.

The solution was to cache the pip downloads and also to keep in a local directory the bigger .whl packages. All done in ~/.pip/pip.conf. Most of the downloads are done once now and using local .whl means no more compilation (I'm looking at you PyYAML ...). I didn't measure the time difference, but for sure it feels faster.

A Simple Python Based Configuration with Overrides

Here's a simple Python based configuration system that supports overrides. We use a variant of it at work and it proves to be very handy. The fact that you can use all of Python in your configuration is very powerful. We use Puppet to write config_local.py in production/qa environments and keep the default good for development machines.

Import Google Bookmarks to Pinboard

I decided to give Pinboard a try. Sadly they lack support for importing Google Bookmarks.

I wrote a little utility to do just that (still waiting for pinboard support to get back to me ;)

Python Logging Overview

Gave a talk at work about Python Logging.

You can view it here.

logbot

We have an internal Jabber server at work, which is great for communication. However unlike HipChat/Campfire - it lacks central logging.

A couple of hours with sleekxmpp, Whoosh and flask solved the problem. logbot is out there - use with caution. (And pull requests are more than welcome ;)

"crashlog" is now on PyPi

FYI: Decided to make crashlog a PyPi package.
LMK if you find any problems.

JSON Handling with datetime Support

While working on some ETL testing code, we needed to load some synthetic data to a database. At first we thought of using YAML for the synthetic data, but it was very slow so we decided to switch to JSON which is still readable but way faster (loading 183 records took 0.68sec with YAML vs 0.008sec in JSON).

However we needed support for serializing datetime objects. Here's dtjson, which support datetime objects in JSON serialization. You can use it almost a drop-in replacement for json: import dtjson as json.

Adding ODBC Source on OSX

At work, we're using Netezza as our main data warehouse. It took me a while to figure out how to add the ODBC driver on OSX so that I'll be able to connect with pyodbc.

Here are the steps:

• Get the OSX Netezza ODBC driver and unpack it
• Not sure where do get it, we have it internally
• Extract the archive somewhere (say /opt/NetezzaODBCDriver)
•  Add  export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="${DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH}":/opt/NetezzaODBCDriver/lib/ to your ~/.zshrc (or ~/.bashrc)
• mkdir -p ~/Library/ODBC
• cp /opt/NetezzaODBCDriver/ini/*.ini ~/Library/ODBC
• Edit ~/Library/ODBC/odbcinst.ini to reflect were your driver is (Driver and Setup keys)
• In our example it'll be Driver = /opt/NetezzaODBCDriver/lib/libnzodbc.so (same for Setup) 

That's it, you can now connect to Netezza from OSX.

Here's a small example usage:

Don't Forget Your Process When Selecting Tools

When selecting tools, there are many things you should consider - prices, value added, integration cost, health ...

However many teams forgot to check how well does the tool integrate with your current development process. A good tool that does not play well with your process will cause many problem and might alter your process a direction you don't want.

For example, we have a process (like many others probably) which involves code reviews. We have a tool with does not play well with code reviews - it has binary projects. The process with this tool is different, much slower and more error prone than the rest of the tools.

Next time you pick a tool to work with, think how well will it play with your current process and take it into consideration.

Note: It might be OK to change the process if the tool is worth it, just make sure it does before you integrate it.