April 2009
10 posts
2 tags
Gray Hat Python
Just ordered my copy of Gray Hat Python from Amazon last night. Here’s the full description of the book:
Gray Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers
Python is fast becoming the programming language of choice for hackers, reverse engineers, and software testers because it’s easy to write quickly, and it has the low-level support and libraries that make...
2 tags
Solution to the XKCD "Substitute" velociraptor...
So, my friend Huaizhi Chen is a huge nerd and one of the smartest guys I know. Because he is simultaneously lame and cool, he spent his Friday night solving Problem #2 in the following XKCD comic:
I saw this solution: http://www.mbeckler.org/velociraptors/velociraptors.html but it relies on genetic programming/evolutionary algorithms, which is slower and doesn’t necessarily guarantee an...
1 tag
CleverCSS Fork
Since I’m using CleverCSS a lot now and it’s no longer maintained, I decided to fork it: http://github.com/dziegler/clevercss/tree/master It contains several important bug fixes and if I have time I’ll try to add support for @ keywords like @media.
Prisoner's Dillema Strikes Again
How much contractors bill per hour
I thought this was a pretty interesting poll on Hacker News asking how much people billed per hour, so I decided to make a histogram. It uses a Dapper feed so the results should be updated either hourly or in real time. You’ll need to have javascript enabled to view the poll. If it doesn’t appear after a few seconds, try refreshing.
The bottom axis is how much a person charges per...
1 tag
Another CleverCSS Patch
Found another bug in CleverCSS. This one prevented you from subtracting values (ie 960px - 200px). Again, I don’t see this being fixed in the official release anytime soon, so you can download the most recent patched version here:
http://code.google.com/p/django-css/downloads/list
At this rate, maybe I’ll just release my own fork.
Update: Forked!...
It is a FACT that I never sleep
Sleep is the cousin of death, as they say.
2 tags
CleverCSS Patch
So after raving about how great CleverCSS is, I discovered a small bug that will cause it to fail with django-css. Basically, if you run CleverCSS from the command line like so:
$ clevercss static/base.ccss
it will output a file called ccss.css in the directory you ran clevercss.py from, instead of creating a file called static/base.css. Fortunately, this was literally a one character fix.
I...
7 tags
CSS compilers rock
I actually wrote django-css because I was looking through the slides from the Reddit keynote at PyCon, and got really excited when I saw what their CSS compiler could do (page 29). Variables, functions, and nested styles in CSS? Could it be? Was I dreaming?
Then after about 5 minutes of searching the internet I realized that this was nothing new, and that there were already tons of CSS compilers...