October Quickie: A Little Bit of Everything

Well yeah, it started snowing today here in Moscow, but this post is not about snow. I remember I’ve done some quickie before, but couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was something I mentioned inside the blog post with a different title. But anyways, this is a short roundup of what I’ve been up to lately.

Let’s start with Python.. After reading a very popular book called Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran (review coming later), I had no choice but to peek at how Python is doing. I didn’t carry out much of the excercizes in the book while reading it, but I did run a few experiments afterwards. Some of the code examples were translated into PHP to immediately implement into my Twibots project, the juice was left for later.

This weekend I decided to gather some data from the Twitter Streaming API for some experimental purposes, and I decided to do this in Python. Of course I hadn’t had much time to read good books (still waiting from Amazon), but the plenty online tutorials, guides and articles out there are quite okay. So with a little trial and error I managed to write a script which gathers a little over 10,000 tweets in 30 minutes and dumps them into a database. That’s 20,000 tweets an hour, ~ half a million tweets a day. What am I going to do with those? I’ll give you an insight on this project a little bit later ;)

Twitter. I finally got #newtwitter. I thought it was a joke. It’s not a secret that I have multiple Twitter accounts, but I use them for development purposes, and guess what, those accounts were switched to the new Twitter three weeks before my account was. So yeah, I’m a little mad at Twitter, but their new look really rocks. They also need some updates to their mobile version.

.NET MVC. Some of you might be wondering (or not) what happened to that .NET MVC project of mine. Well it’s 99% finished, but we’re constantly coming up with changes to the content part, switching images around and other dirty work. Latest comment from the client was – okay so I open up Safari, click View and check the Zoom Text Only option. Then I zoom in and the whole design breaks! You guys promised me nice-looking XHTML in Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE and Firefox, what the heck?

PHP. I wrote an app in PHP that allows me to turn off my PC from my iPhone. I extended it to include volume up/down features a few days later. These are the kind of apps you write when you’re lazy ;)

And finally some goodies from all around the web for web designers and developers:

• A new CSS framework is in town: The Square Grid
• 60 Exclusive Free Icons: “Childish”
• Kontagent Unleashes New Version Of Facebook Analytics Platform
• HTML5 Canvas Element Guide by Louis Lazaris
• Five Useful Design Techniques and Coding Solutions For Web Designers
• Get MySQL Replication up and running in 5 minutes
• The Ultimate Guide to Object Oriented Basics of JavaScript by Joseph McCullough

That’s it for today. Cheers!