I've migrated back to https://kurtmckee.org/.

Please update your links and feeds.

A long time ago I inherited a big monolithic mess of Tera Term macro code. After a few years the code base had grown considerably and become extremely unwieldy. I finally decided that it was time to fix the problem and created some utility code that would allow me to make the code more modular (and make the code more reusable for other projects). ( Read more... )

I'm pleased to announce the release of listparser 0.18!

This release simply replaces the regular expression-based RFC 822 date parser with procedural code. The package is available on PyPI.

listparser is a Python module that parses subscription lists (also called reading lists) and returns all of the feeds and subscription lists that it finds. It ( Read more... )

I'm pleased to announce the release of feedparser 5.2.0!

It's available only on the Python Package Index (PyPI) as Google Code is shutting down its services. The update incorporates over two years of work and patches from multiple authors.

Some of the release highlights include what will hopefully be a significant boost to performance: all in- ( Read more... )

It's been twelve days since my shoulder surgery so I thought I'd post a summary of what I've been up to.

In the first 24 hours there was an issue that cropped up at work. The problem was caused by an update to some software released by another group in the company, and, as frequently happens, I had warned the responsible group several months in ( Read more... )

With basically ten lines of code and a trivial template modification I've added support for multiple categories to Pelican. I'll make the code freely available soon. I expect to finalize the migration soon ( Read more... )

Good news! I have almost 200 blog entries spanning eight years "imported" into Pelican (really, I have almost 200 text files on a USB drive). I've even written code that automatically converts in-blog links from LiveJournal URL's to the new URL scheme. I really need multiple categories, though, in part because I want the site to be extremely feeds- ( Read more... )

I misspoke, apparently: the Unicode problem in the first tool was stemming from something weird going on with the xmlrpclib.Binary.decode() function. Extracting the raw utf-8 data and decoding that gets me the data I expect. New problem: some of my entries are not fully HTML. The paragraphs are not wrapped in
tags, resulting in a massive blob of ( Read more... )

Apparently Python-based LiveJournal softwares think they're special snowflakes that don't have to deal with Unicode. The first library created severe corruption and truncation. The second tool immediately crashed because it assumed I was using a Cyrillic locale that was compatible with characters the library's author introduced in the output (and ( Read more... )

I've gotten the site to a decent visual and functional state -- pagination works, categories work, feeds work...it still feels like it's missing something, either a functional or navigational element. Maybe it doesn't feel right simply because I'm unaccustomed to a single-column blog ( Read more... )