So you’ve been working in Python for a year and then along comes a PHP gig that you just can’t pass up. All of a sudden you’re realizing just how much you miss some of the familiar Pythonisms you’ve come to rely on. One such feature that is lacking in PHP is the concept of descriptors. Fortunately, it’s possible to pretty closely simulate their behaviour in PHP with just a few special interfaces and classes.

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Twitter by nature is a stream of distractions. I personally never keep Twitter open and visible while I’m working because I know I’ll be too easily derailed from whatever I’m doing. If Life Hacker reported that a single email arriving in your inbox can cost you over a minute of mental recovery time, Twitter’s rapid-fire updates could prove to be literally stupefying.

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uTidyLib is a Python wrapper for the HTML Tidy Library. It’s a pretty handy library and is dead simple to use, but unfortunately it does not compile on Leopard out of the box. I wrote a quick patch to fix it, and will maintain a vendor branch on GitHub since development seems to have been abandoned years ago.

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TextMate is great for general editing of most text formats. By default, reStructuredText is not one of them. This document describes how to fix TextMate so that it is a better fit for the tools I work with. We want reStructuredText rendered previews and HTML export functions in TextMate.

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So the Safari beta 4 has landed and opinions are all over the place about the new features. The most consistent target for criticism has been the changes to the tab interface. Although the differences were a little disconcerting at first, I’ve come to love the new tabs and I even took a cue from Safari and decided to improve one of my most precious tools: Panic‘s Coda.

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I’ve been a fan of Paver since the first time I read about it. It gives me all of the control I want with just enough of an implied structure to keep things sane and easy. The problem was, I couldn’t get the latest version, which had many shiny new features. You know how I feel about shiny, so I obviously needed to find a way to run Paver’s trunk, lest I invalidate my work by targeting the almost-irrelevant current version.

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