ScaryBear Recent Articles

For me, there used to be a time when the word partisan evoked images of French people sabotaging railroads and rescuing downed Allied airmen. Currently the word reminds me of the crazy that has descended on our country.

Depends on what the definition of 'is' is

I don't know if things used to be different, but as I got older I started to notice the rhetorical games being played by both sides of the political spectrum. Those games seem to be reaching a pivotal point, something alarming.

I hate the labels liberal and conservative, because they have no meaning ...

Explicit is better than implicit, as I found today working with python's built-in minidom library. I happened that I was taking a minidom element, converting it to its XML string, manipulating that string, and then attempting to recreate the minidom element by passing the XML to parseString.

It kept throwing an exception in regards to illegal tokens, certain characters such as ∑ and π would cause this. I did not understand why this was occurring since I had already parsed the entire document, which contained this element's XML, and no exceptions were thrown.

The problem lay with how I ...

Zombie has gotten a face lift since I started my new job with Advanced Systems at UCF. I completely rewrote it to make it better in speed and readability.

For example, when called as a module it no longer automatically writes the converted document to disk immediately. The user has the ability to access and manipulate the data before it is written, if it is written at all.

from zombie import Zombie
job = Zombie('in.docx', 'out.html')
if job.convert():
    document = job.output.data   #Converted Document data
    assets   = job.output.assets #Ancillary assets (images, audio, etc...)
    job.finalize()               #Writes ...

The following are people that don't deserve attention from anyone (yes I realize there is a certain bit of irony in making a list of people that shouldn't get attention). They continue to exist in the public eye despite their propensity for lying, ignorance, rashness, and poor judgement.

Their influence is derived from their ally's and enemy's unwillingness to just ignore them. If you stop giving a shit about them, they will just go away.

I will continue to update the list as I see fit. Additionally, while this initial list is filled with nothing but ...

Those who know me know that I've fallen in love with the Python programming language, and as a result I've begun trying to share my interest with co-workers and friends. I wanted to write a small article I could point to that would give these people a basic introduction to some of the more basic datatypes in python.

While python shares a lot of conventions with other programming languages, it also diverges a bit from the languages beginners are usually taught. The first thing that comes to mind is the concept of arrays.

In C or PHP we ...