Posts by flipperpa

by flipperpa on June 30, 2015, 4:50 p.m.

There are many different methods of generating a PDF in Python (and therefore, Django), that I have been exploring over the past few days for a project. After looking through these, this one seems straightforward.

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by flipperpa on May 5, 2014, 12:04 a.m.

It was quite a beauty for its day. CDnow started off as a Telnet store, back in the days when people did not even consider the danger of sending your credit card details without encryption. When the CDnow web site was developed, there were not many mature web servers available, so the founders wrote their own in C, called "mserver" (or, Matt's server, after Matt Olim, co-founder). On top of C, Matt started a language called SDK (Site Development Kit), a scripting language tied to Oracle which did many things far ahead of its time.

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by flipperpa on Dec. 19, 2017, 2:50 p.m.

Here's a quick trick using the Python library pygments to enable pretty colors in your terminal when viewing source code. It detects which syntax highlighter to use by the file's extension.

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by flipperpa on May 23, 2012, 1:06 p.m.

I helped host the first Philadelphia Women in Technology Summit during Philly Tech Week 2012. Being the only man at a tech conference gave me enormous appreciation for women in tech, and the extra steep hills they have to climb.

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by flipperpa on Jan. 5, 2018, 2:54 a.m.

Bootstrap 4 provides some wonderful classes to use with various types of embedded content. In this post, I'll show how to use Wagtail's embed package to choose which Bootstrap CSS class to use in Django templates.

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by flipperpa on Feb. 23, 2012, 2:38 p.m.

SOPA and PIPA were recently shelved, but not defeated, and their international cousin ACTA is still gaining momentum. Find out why the fight is not yet over, as well as a back in intellectual property and how they apply to technology.

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by flipperpa on Nov. 17, 2011, 2:40 p.m.

Cory Doctorow held a lecture and Q&A Session on November 17th, 2011 at The Wharton School in Jon M. Huntsman Hall. It was open to the general public.

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by flipperpa on Feb. 11, 2011, 2:49 p.m.

Just a quick post to provide a link to a book I helped write a chapter in, although I must admit, I had a bit of sticker shock!

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by flipperpa on Dec. 17, 2010, 2:09 p.m.

Python isn't named after a snake, it is named after Monty Python. Being half British, my father ensured I grew up ensconced in Monty Python. My Godfather, a force in me becoming a programmer, was also a huge Monty Python fan. He authored books on early computer science.

The Second Life community of LSL programmers had a pretty good sense of humor. The wiki page was defaced, and after a few years, I decided it was time to recover some of the funnier pages that were posted, which all had nuggets of wisdom. Without further ado...

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