Both Ruby and Python offer great interactive shells, also known as REPLs (Read Eval Print Loops). These are handy for verifying snippets of code. You can invoke Python's by simply running python or Ruby's by running irb, jirb (for jRuby), or rails c (for Rails). Sometimes, however, one can be mystified as to what one … Continue reading Exploring Ruby and Python interactively

TeXnicCenter is an excellent IDE for developing TeX documents on Windows. It follows the usual interface conventions and is quite helpful in getting started and debugging. TeX is the standard page layout language for writing mathematical and scientific papers. Here are some excellent tutorials for getting started with TeX. The IDE requires MikTeX for actually … Continue reading An IDE for TeX

When writing Python scripts which rely on python-ldap and openLDAP, it is often useful to turn on debug messages as follows: import ldap; # enable python-ldap logging ldap.set_option(ldap.OPT_DEBUG_LEVEL, 4095) # enable openLDAP logging l = ldap.initialize('ldap://yourserver:port', trace_level=2) This is also useful when debugging the LDAP Plugin for Trac.

(This applies to Java and C, but the code is given in Python for readability.) Is it faster to iterate over multiple separate arrays (tuples) of simple variables? for i in range(0, n): phone = phones[i]; # ... email = emails[i]; Or over a single array of complex variables? for i in range(0, n): phone … Continue reading Array access and virtual memory