Disqus - Latest Comments for David Goodger

Re: Pep Turds

David Goodger — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:50:22 -0000

It's also known as an Emacs locals stanza. It's referred to as a turd with affection, not derision :-)

Re: Help improve my PyOhio talk

David Goodger — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:39:28 -0000

"A fair number of code samples had the last few lines truncated."

Truncated vertically or horizontally? If vertically, put less code on the slides. If horizontally, wrap lines (fewer columns).

Slides have limited space. You just have to deal with it. And slides aren't the end-all of presentations. If they don't work for you, do something else (even just for part of your talk).

If you have a lot of code to show, switch to an editor. Turn the font size way up, and turn on auto-wrapping. In an editor, you have the freedom to scroll around, select text, correct typos & bugs, etc.

Re: Help improve my PyOhio talk

David Goodger — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:16:32 -0000

The way I deal with resolution differences is to use the Firefox "Web Developer" extension. It has a "Resize" feature where you can specify what size you want. Open a new window for your slides, make it full-screen (F11), resize to 1024x768, then reload the slideshow (ctrl-R). You'll get exactly what you'll see from the projector.

Re: code-formatting people: I need your help

David Goodger — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:04:32 -0000

Breaking assignments over multiple lines: try to avoid backslashes. They're fragile and ugly. One space after the backslash will break it. Instead, I'd do:

cat1, cat2, cat3, cat4, cat5 = [
self.categories[x] for x in range(1, 6)]

IOW, use the properties of Python's brackets (and braces and parentheses).

As for conditional expressions, I hope you realize that these two dictionaries are almost identical:

{'selected':1 if self.preferred_send_method == x else None,
'disabled':1 if disabled else None,}

{'selected': self.preferred_send_method == x,
'disabled': disabled,}

Python's True == 1, and False == 0, so just use the condition directly as in the second version above. You used None as a false value; unless there's a good reason not to, you should use False instead.

Re: Commentary on Python from a Java programming perspective

David Goodger — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:41:42 -0000

Welcome to Python!

You may be interested in a tutorial I gave in 2007 at PyCon and OSCON, "Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python". Full notes here: http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/...

Re: Become a Master Designer: Rule Three: Contrast, Contrast, Contrast

David Goodger — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:01:34 -0000

I agree that contrast is important. But why do so many web pages (this one included) put their text in such a low contrast gray on an off-white background? I find it very hard to read.

Why not black (or a much darker gray) for the body text?