find, grep, sed, and awk.

I gave a lunchtime presentation on find, grep, sed, and awk. After the jump you’ll find the slides, and a bunch of links that were helpful to me.

Tweeting in Python – the easy way

Suppose you want to send tweets from Python code from your own Twitter account. How hard could that be? It’s Python, so the batteries are included right?

It turns out that the Python side is pretty slick, but there are some issues about interacting with Twitter that aren’t as easy as you could imagine.

Do I need to use a library?

The mature Python Twitter libraries, (Python Twitter Tools, and Python Twitter) will allow you to do anything that you could want with the Twitter API. But you’re just trying to send tweets, you don’t need to look at your friends’ timelines’. Maybe this approach is more what you are looking for?

Well not exactly like that. That approach uses Basic Authentication, which is no longer supported. Whatever you do will require OAuth, so it’s definitely going to take less time to use a library for novice twitter devs.

The absolute easiest way

Cygwin setup gotchas

If you have gained any level of skill with the standard Unix/Linux command-line utilities, you will not be content to use cmd.exe. Yet many of us have no choice but to spend our days working on a Windows machine.

Thus the creation of  Cygwin was completely inevitable.

Cygwin is great, but there are a few installations gotchas. Here are four things that tripped me up the first or second time around.

Hello, world!

public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}

I executed that program about 30 months ago. For me, it was a moment of optimism, now that Java was installed and working, I could focus on learning how to program. For my wife, it was depressing. Seeing the plain white text on the black console window highlighted how much I had yet to learn.