Programming Leftovers
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Intermediate Web Scraping and API Harvesting using R workshop
Learn how to use web scraping in R! Join our workshop on Intermediate Web Scraping and API Harvesting using R which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series.
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Hubert Figuière: Niepce April 2023 updates
This is the April 2023 update for Niepce. Between outages caused by an unseasonbly ice storm, squirrels chewing cable, I discovered how painful is being off the grid. This is not the excuse, just the events that lead to downtime and April not being very productive.
The importer moved a little bit forward. I tried to use the brand new "sort by date" importer tool, that is used to test and exercise the logic. The improved importer address a few long standing issues, including not using libgphoto2 for USB Mass Storage, including flash card readers. This was a shortcut I had taken and the result was suboptimal. The new approach is to use libgphoto2 to find the device, and then switch to pure filesystem operations. That was issue 26.
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Learning reloaded - Qt Academy [Ed: Indoctrination or training for proprietary software diguised as education]
As many of you have noticed, we just launched our new Qt Academy! Thus, we have recently received many questions regarding our learning initiatives. So, it’s about time we wrote a blog post to keep things transparent and all of you well-informed.
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A user's guide for the people API
Longtime Pythonista Ned Batchelder gave the first of four keynotes at PyCon's 20th-anniversary edition, PyCon 2023, which was held April 19-27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. In fact, it is still being held at the time of this writing; the sprints continue for four days after the three days of main-conference talks. Batchelder presented his thoughts on communication, how it can often go awry for technical people, and how to make it work better.
PyCon chair Mariatta Wijaya introduced Batchelder by suggesting that she would not be in that role today if he had not encouraged her on the day before she was to give her first Python talk. He simply told her that the talk she had put together was good, which was enough to allow her to put aside thoughts of canceling the talk. She chose him as a keynote speaker because she wanted everyone else in the community to know more about a person who was so influential for her when she was getting started on her Python journey.
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Nikola: static-site generation in Python
Static-site generators are tools that generate HTML pages from source files, often written in Markdown or another markup language. They have built-in templates and themes, which allows developers to create lightweight and secure web sites that can be easily maintained using version control. One of these tools is Nikola, written in Python.
There are several reasons to choose a static-site generator. A static site does not need infrastructure like databases or scripting languages on the server, so it is simpler to set up and maintain and avoids the risk of whole classes of security vulnerabilities like SQL injections. The output from statically generated sites tends to be simpler and, as a result, loads more quickly. A static site is simple to set up, since it only needs a web server hosting the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Moreover, without dynamic parts, the site can be completely managed by checking its source files into Git or another version-control tool.