Pirnat.com

Pretty much out of nowhere, I suddenly decided that what the world really needs is a Battlestar Galactica-themed version of the classic Battleship game. Besides the obvious cool factor of having a board full of miniature BSG ships, I think there’s a lot of depth to be added by tweaking the rules a little […]

Once upon a time, I upgraded to Leopard on my Mac Pro, and, though I did not mention it at the time, something in upgrade land totally pissed off my Brother 5070N laser printer.
I’d bought the printer in the first place because it was one of the first to support Bonjour (née Rendezvous, née Zeroconf) […]

Dear Lazyweb:
I have a number of programming itches that I’d like to scratch that are just slightly large enough that I’d really love to just use something that already exists (if available). I’d spend a while digging around, but, well… I’m lazy, and I’m busy. So hopefully some of you have suggestions. […]

The thing about being a relatively new parent is that life very quickly becomes a complete blur, and after a certain point you’ve no sense of what day it is, let alone how many weeks old your little bundle of joy is. This makes life tricky, since there are certain milestone weeks that are […]

Since everyone else is doing it…

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}’|sort -rn|head
145 ls
143 cd
136 vim
108 svn
90 jobs
65 %1
50 %2
47 nosetests
47 less
21 grep

%1 and %2 are usually me hopping back into backgrounded vim sessions. jobs is me trying to remember what all I’ve already got open for editing. The […]

Google App Engine seems pretty freaking sweet to me. In short:

write apps in Python
deploy on Google’s infrastructure
access to existing Google goodness like BigTable, email, and authentication
free account can use up to 500MB of storage and serve ~5M page views/month
non-free accounts coming soon
can upload additional modules as long as they fit the sandbox rules

Unfortunately the […]

Stairway Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.
The security line at O’Hare was almost non-existent, so now I’ve got a bit of time to kill and (since “free wireless network” doesn’t seem to want to give me any DNS) have the laptop open, it’s probably time to digest and process my PyCon […]

I haven’t been posting much lately because I’ve either been too busy to write anything or too not-busy to have anything worth writing about. So here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to, in more or less random order.
I’m thinking of moving our blogs to private hosting on WebFaction, partly because I […]

I’ve been looking for a decent chart or graph library lately for a soon-to-be-hatched personal project, and been largely disappointed by the state of what’s available for Python. The freely available choices all felt a bit clunky to me, either in usage or in output (or in some cases, both), and the strongest contender […]

So now that things have calmed down a little bit, I finally had time to install Leopard on the Mac Pro this weekend. I know I’m a bit late to the party, but here are a few quick thoughts so far…
The Good:

Time Machine — syncs happily to the 500GB internal drive I installed last […]