Skip to main content

Education by Slashdot

There was some story on slashdot and was tagged myhovercraftisfullofeels. Naturally I started a search on this and this page told me that it was some monty python thing. And I realized how much of my education about the fake modern world has come from slashdot.

For instance I have learned acronyms and phrases

IANAL - I am not a lawyer
IANAP - I am not a physicist
YMMV - Your mileage may vary
YRO - your rights online
5uXx0rZ
ISP - internet service provider (In the real world this is Indian Sari Palace)
OMG ponies!!!!
in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics
my hovercraft is full of eels
vapor ware
In Soviet Russia YOU educate slashdot


I have learned about cool websites

xkcd - a cool geek comic
dark roasted blend

And tens of other tid-bits of modern geek speak than enable me to maintain my alter ego at work and blend in.

Ahh, slashdot, where the comments are so much more interesting than the articles.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...

Store numpy arrays in sqlite

Use numpy.getbuffer (or sqlite3.Binary ) in combination with numpy.frombuffer to lug numpy data in and out of the sqlite3 database: import sqlite3, numpy r1d = numpy.random.randn(10) con = sqlite3.connect(':memory:') con.execute("CREATE TABLE eye(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, desc TEXT, data BLOB)") con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", sqlite3.Binary(r1d))) con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", numpy.getbuffer(r1d))) res = con.execute("SELECT * FROM eye").fetchall() con.close() #res -> #[(1, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b220, size 80 at 0x10371b1e0>), # (2, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b190, size 80 at 0x10371b150>)] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[0][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[1][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] Note that for work where data ty...