About
Welcome
I had worked for several years at a large institution
when a friend invited me
to Python Atlanta,
a local meetup for programmers.
I had thought that books and blogs were keeping me up to date,
but conversation with real people
taught me so much more!
I made the fateful decision
to attend PyCon 2008 and two
Plone conferences,
after which, I was hooked!
A few months later I resigned my position
and became an independent developer
so that I could send myself
to as many conferences as I wanted.
My vocation has been transformed
thanks to the Python community.
While doing Python and occasional JavaScript programming
for customers large and small,
I focus on giving back to a movement that has given me so much.
My talks and tutorials have taken me everywhere from the
middle of Arkansas
to the country of Poland,
and people from several continents
have offered improvements to the software
that I myself contribute back to the community.
I live in Bluffton, Ohio, with my wife Jackie and two cats.
My Blog
Recent Posts
2013 Feb 25 —
OS-9 Keyboard Codes
2013 Feb 14 —
WSGI and truncated chunked response bodies
2013 Jan 12 —
iPython Notebook and Astronomy at CodeMash
2012 Aug 23 —
Map Projection and Radarmatic
2012 Jun 14 —
Throwaway Commits on Heroku
All Posts Ever
Tags:
books (4)
computing (64)
document processing (7)
emacs (4)
grok (6)
plone (2)
pyephem (6)
python (51)
web notes (8)
zope (8)
Free Preview!
My Book
I recently had the privilege of revising John Goerzen's
Foundations of Python Network Programming to produce a
Second Edition.
Free chapter:
Chapter 10 — Screen Scraping
I was stunned at how far Python has come.
When the first edition was written in 2004,
HTMLParser was the preferred screen scraper,
xmlrpclib was the reigning protocol for async web requests,
and the book skipped web frameworks entirely (it ignored Zope)
to present chapters on cgi
and mod_python instead!
Take a look at the Second Edition if you are interested
in a thorough tour of the network stack as seen from modern Python,
including tutorial introductions to popular libraries like
BeautifulSoup,
lxml,
and paramiko.
All example programs from the book
are available for free from
my BitBucket repository
which also offers Python 3 versions of each script
in case you have already made the leap!