Articles about programming

1. Python & standard output redirection on ms-windows

   Redirecting standard output of the Python script on ms-windows can cause strange crashes because of encoding differences.

2. Profiling Python scripts (5): ent_without_numpy

   This is the fifth in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. The program ent_without_numpy.py is a lot slower than the version that uses numpy. The performance of ent_without_numpy.py is the topic of this article.

3. Profiling Python scripts (4): vecops.indexate

   This is the fourth in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. The performance of stl2ps is the topic of this article.

4. Profiling Python scripts (3): stl2ps

   This is the third in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. The performance of stl2ps is the topic of this article.

5. Profiling Python scripts (2): stlinfo

   This is the second in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts. In this second article the performance of stlinfo is looked at.

6. Profiling Python scripts (1): stl2pov

   This is the first in a series of articles that covers analyzing and improving performance bottlenecks in Python scripts.

7. Simple setup.py for python scripts

   Installing Python scripts (as opposed to modules) is a too involved using distutils/setuptools. Those do not take into account zipped archives and scripts using a GUI toolkit. The latter is a problem on ms-windows.

   So I wrote my own setup scripts to do things differently;

   • A simple setup script that works on single-file scripts.
   • A setup script that can wrap applications plus their custom module up in a zip-file and install it as a single self-contained file.
   • They should work on POSIX and ms-windows without root/administrator privileges.
   • And they should not require anything outside the python standard library.

   These scripts are now available on github as setup-py-script.

8. Why can’t a piece of software be finished?

   It is rare to see a piece of software considered “done”. The TeX typesetting engine in one of the few examples I could name. Why isn’t this more common?

9. Switching to SSH keys for github

   This article covers some aspects of using SSH keys with github that are left out of the original documentation on github.

   It assumes that you’ve been using HTTPS with a password for remote access to github.

10. On the nature of GUI programs

    This is based on answers (1, 2) I gave on stackoverflow. That answer is specific to the tkinter toolkit that comes with Python. The principles apply to other GUI toolkits and languages as well but the terminology used (like mainloop and idle task) may be different.