Paul Butler, a self-described Data Hacker, recently published an article called “Make for Data Scientists“, which explored the challenges of managing data processing work. Paul went on to explain why GNU Make could be a viable tool for easing this pain. He also pointed out some limitations with Make, for example the assumption that all data is local.

We were gladdened to read Paul’s article, because we’d been hard at work building an internal tool to help manage our data workflows. A defining goal was to end up with a kind of “Make for data”, but targeted squarely at the problems of managing data workflow.

Enter a YouTube URL, wait a little while, download an MP3. Convenient.

Currently, there aren’t any tools to grab all of the publisher-provided shorter URL in a standards-agnostic way. Tools that will grab either rev=”canonical” or rel=”shorturl”, but not both.

That’s where isshort.com comes in. isshort doesn’t care what URL shortening standard the publisher uses, it will find them all. This user-focused design will hopefully spur more sites and apps to provide their own short URLs.

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Currently, isshort.com supports short URLs using the rel=”canonical”, rel=”shortlink”, and rel=”shorturl” standards.

Also, isshort shortens Amazon.com (amzn.com), YouTube (youtu.be), and NPR (n.pr) links.

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript implementation, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

delatt: Delete attachments. delatt strips attachments from email, and can optionally save the attachments to files. It will work with either mbox or maildir files.

It's great for archiving old email without wasting space on attachments and the extra HTML message parts that some MUAs attach.

Usage: Click the "Add Fonts" button, check the agreement and download your fonts. If you need more fine-grain control, choose the Expert option.

Over time, though, my initially rosy feelings towards ORMs have begun to sour. I gradually realised I was spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to coax the ORM into doing my bidding - and when I succeeded, the results were often ugly, slow and needlessly opaque. Analysing the performance of some of the more complicated portions of my data access layer was often painful, and I spent cumulative hours poring over generated SQL, trying to figure out what the ORM was doing and why. Usually, improving performance involved side-stepping the ORM altogether. Recently, a particularly gnarly performance issue prompted me to ditch the ORM from a project altogether, with surprisingly pleasant results.

Some of our PERL tools require some CPAN modules that are not part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. It's obviously possible to install the module using CPAN but I like using deb packages where possible as then you only have one repository to manage. Fortunately with dh-make-perl it is possible to quickly turn any CPAN module in to a debian package!

Please enter the URL of a YouTube movie to watch in HTML5 format:

Heechee is a transparent mercurial-as-subversion gateway. It serves a Mercurial repository as a Subversion WebDAV-based repository. It's still in the early stages, but at the moment it will serve its own mercurial repository to subversion in such a way that you can check out the repository, and update to various revisions within it.