The touring knight problem is a maths problem that takes the movement of a knight in chess and attempts to find a path around a two dimensional board such that every single square is visited exactly once.

There are more sofisicated solutions but as you might have imagined, brute forcing is the most naive approach to solving this problem.

By trying every possible combination of legal move from your current position you can follow through every legal path and check whether you've completed the board or not.

If you're a python programmer, you've most likely heard of [virtualenv][a]. If you haven't, then you need to check it out.

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

In a nutshell, you can create as many virtual environments as you want. Each of these virtual environments is a small directory structure, which contains a copy of your python interpreter(s), and provides a sandbox environment in which you can install only the necessary packages you need to run your project, as well as remove your programs' dependence on system packages and python versions.

This is a cool little site I stumbled across. It's an artist website about a guy who takes data and builds something arty out of it. I especially enjoyed the soup of asteroids around our solar system coloured by threat level.

I'd love to have that video constantly playing in a digital canvas including the sound track in my hallway as visitors arrive. It is also a pretty intense reminder of how many objects live in our empty void.

So, you use Asterisk professionally, for fun, or both, and you want to know how to optimize the shit out of your Asterisk platform? No problem, I've got you covered.

Grab a beer, free up the next 2 hours of your time, and let's get to it!

Our good friend Randall was talking about how he liked prototype inheritance such as that in JavaScript. He enjoyed how you can add, modify and remove methods from JavaScript classes and have them apply to all object instances.

Amazed as he was, he's now forcing me at gun point to write a post about it!

The first thing you have to understand about Python classes is that all they are is a collection of references to members. Methods are just function pointers that are referenced by the class, not embedded or copied into the class. This is why all methods require that the first parameter be self, the current instance. Instances themselves contain the real state and reference the class. When you invoke a method on the instance it looks up what function to call.

If you didn't read my previous post, you'll want to check that out first: The Purely Functional Python Brainfuck Challenge.

So, today was the first day I really invested some thought and time into the challenge. I decided that before just diving into code I'd spend some time reading up on functional programming in python, and learn a bit.

The first thing I read through was the official python functional programming page which you can find here. This had a bunch of useful information regarding functional programming tools in python, but didn't really have any examples of actual functional programs.

People are always wondering if Python has a ternary operator. The answer is yes but no.

There is no recognised ternary operator. However it is very simple to construct one out of logic operations.

Python short circuits conditional evaluations. This means that given a series of logic operations, if it can plainly see that a certain branch of that logic is unreachable or of no consequence it wont even attempt to execute it.

A question that is frequently asked by new Django programmers is: "How can I serve static content (css, images, javascript) with the Django development server?". This article is my attempt to answer that question by demonstrating the best practices way to do so.

Why Doesn't Django Serve Static Content Automatically?

Well, Django (and python in general) is built around the idea that it is better to be explicit than implicit. This concept means that you may need to write more code in order to do something, but that by doing it that way, you preserve code clarity and reduce complexity.

A little bit of code that loads network device statistics from any operating system that supports procfs.

Just a small snippet. Originally used in some network monitoring code that I wrote that graphed your network traffic.

I would include that here too but that's a little messy.

At work, I'm the lead developer of a rather large, complex web application which interacts with many different technologies (Asterisk, Freeswitch, Cisco routers, python, XML-RPC, JSON, Django--to name a few). A few days ago, while implementing a ban system, I bumped into an interesting problem that was not trivial to find a solution to. So, here it is :)

Background

The web application I'm developing is a private portal which allows users to manage teleconference lines real time. Since all of our telephony services are free of charge, we often get callers onto certain teleconference lines who want to abuse services (think of those trolls on the internet, except over the phone). As you can probably imagine, without strict regulation & technology in place, telephone trolls could cause huge problems for normal users.