I always have several bash shells running in Emacs (M-x shell).  The default scrolling behavior drives me crazy.

If comint-scroll-show-maximum-output is non-nil, then arrival of output when point is at the end tries to scroll the last line of text to the bottom line of the window, showing as much useful text as possible. (This mimics the scrolling behavior of most terminals.) The default is set to True.

I don’t like chasing the output of shell commands to the bottom of the window.  You can add this to your  .emacs to keep the window from scrolling.

;; Don't scroll to bottom for shell output
(setq comint-scroll-show-maximum-output nil)

Quick way to locate the Python site-packages directory:

python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"

Most likely here on Mac OS X:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages

The buildout project is a tool for developing, packaging, and deploying Python applications.

Brandon Craig Rhodes released an excellent screencast on buildout from his presentation at PyAtl.

I always forget the names of really big numbers. What do you call 1,000,000,000,000,000? It’s one quadrillion. What about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000? One undecillion.

Checkout this nifty directive to the format function in Common Lisp.

(format nil "~r" 1606938044258990275541962092)

Which produces this string:

one octillion six hundred six septillion nine hundred thirty-eight sextillion forty-four quintillion two hundred fifty-eight quadrillion nine hundred ninety trillion two hundred seventy-five billion five hundred forty-one million nine hundred sixty-two thousand ninety-two.

I spent last week at the Zope 3 Foliage Sprint in Concord, Massachusetts.  Stephan Richter and JSA Technologies put together an awesome sprint.  One of the projects I worked on was a static version of the Zope 3 API Documentation (APIDOC).  That means you don’t have to run Zope 3 in dev mode just to read the API!

The Zope 3 API is now available online:

http://apidoc.zope.org/ 

Python 3.0a1 is available for download.


$ python3.0
Python 3.0a1 (py3k, Sep 1 2007, 00:29:23)
[GCC 4.0.0 20041026 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 4061)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>


This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

There’s more to the iPhone than meets the eye. I like Steven Frank’s take on it:

It is like a piece of advanced alien technology sent back five years in time.

Only time will tell, but I think it’s a game changer.