If you have a string, let’s say, “2009-02-19 02:18:00”, and you need a unix timestamp, the dateutils library is super useful. You can grab it with sudo easy_install python-dateutil and then you can run your strings through it like so: dateutil.parser.parse(‘2009-02-19 02:18:00’).strftime(’%s’) Why isn’t ‘%s’ anywhere to be found in the strftime docs? That would make this somewhat easier to figure out. ...

So, say you’ve got these dicts of files and metadata that, for whatever reason, you need in a dict. What if you need to sort that list while maintaining key/value pairs? (I know that this example is contrived, but I actually have this problem in something I’m working on) Itemgetter will do you just fine if you don’t need the key/value pairs to be maintained, but if you need the pairs intact, a lambda will do the same job for you. ...

If you’ve got a particularly complicated python class that you need to pickle, you might find that it’s a little unusual when it comes out the other side. This could be because by default init and new aren’t called on objects when they’re unpickled. If you need your init/new behaviour to be called at unpickle time, you can define getinitargs or getnewargs to request the methods you want to be run. These methods should return tuples containing the variables you’d like to call the method of your choice with. They’re called at pickle time and the tuple that they generate is stored with the object. ...

If you just need one file from a branch in git, you can grab it with checkout: It never occurred to me that this would work, because, frankly, it’s far too easy. Good work, Git.

If you want to have a look through your git diffs in a more useful editor than the default, you can just pipe it in on the command line: Or, you can set your GIT_PAGER environment variable to your editor of choice. Thanks to the good people at Stack Overflow.

If you’re in the UK and you muck about with prices a lot, you might have to convert them to the new (new-ish, anyway) VAT value of 15%. I made this TextMate command to make life a little easier for you.

I spent a while knocking this together once before, then deleted it, so when I set out to find it again, I found this rather handy Guide to Elixir Autoloading. Thank you, whoever wrote that! I really don’t get why this can’t be as simple as ActiveRecord, but sure, whatever, Python does like to be complicated.

Getting the Python Imaging Library (v1.1.6) working in MacOS (Leopard) took a bit too much reading for my liking, so here’s how I did it. First off you’ll need to get yourself the libjpeg source. Basically, Follow this guide to get libjpeg installed. It’s not quite that simple though: when you run .configure, you’ll need to get it to actually give you your libraries: ...

I feel the need to post this because it’s not very clear to new rails users and if someone had posted it before my life would have been easier. Most Ruby on Rails tutorials are, for a start, incorrect, because they’re old (Thanks to David Lynch for helping me on that front), but even those that feature the slightly more up to date information aren’t clear on one point. This is the point. ...