1. Finding stuff in lists of dicts in Python
If you have a list of dicts in Python like this:
aXRlbXMgPSBbeyJpZCI6MSwgIm5hbWUiOiAiUmFzbXVzIn0sIHsiaWQiOiAyLCAibmFtZSI6ICJSaWNrIn1d
…and want to check if there are any dict items with an id of a specific value (e.g. 2) I first came up with this:
MiBpbiBtYXAobGFtYmRhIHg6IHhbJ2lkJ10sIGl0ZW1zKQ==
The downside is that it will loop all items which may be inefficient [...]

Update: I have made some significant changes to Twoot and it now works well as my primary twitter client. Check out the TODO and README over at Github for more information on features etc.
Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad [...]

James Simmons writes about some of the pros and cons of Microformats and RDF (but not RDFa?). Here are my thoughts on some of the items he mention.

Over at the standards-schmandards blog I often test websites to gather statistics on specific HTML use, accessibility and other things. Each time I have written a web crawler to collect the data. In Python and Ruby this is a simple task but last time it was like a déjà vu and I decided to create a Ruby library that I could use in the future.

I have received an increasing number of advertising inquiries from MySpace layout sites. Apparently the term “MySpace layouts” is a very popular search term these days. Looking at the default MySpace layouts one can unserstand why. I am confident that they didn’t hire a designer to create the default MySpace look and feel. Looking at the MySpace HTML, they certainly didn’t hire a GUI developer.

So, I was looking for an offer on IP telephony and thus decided to point my browser to one of the larger ISP:s. I get a blank page back (blank as in “all white”). A couple of years ago, this wasn’t uncommon if you were brave enough to use a non-mainstream browser. But today it [...]