Tips – Page 2 – Chad Dotson

PyCharm and Version Control

By chad June 6, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

So, you want to add your PyCharm project files to a VCS but you constantly deal with problems because each of your team members have different names/locations for their project interpreter. There is a rather simple solution to this problem. Basically, at the project level, PyCharm only cares about the…

Automating Pylint with Gulp.js

By chad February 6, 2015Doing Things Better, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Automating Pylint (and other Python Tasks) can be achieved with several viable python-based methods, but what if we used Gulp.js? The following code snippet gathers runs Pylint on the set of python files defined by pySource. var gulp = require('gulp'), shell = require('gulp-shell'); gulp.task("pylint", function() { log('Linting with pylint ->…

No Comments – A Failure Twice

By chad August 17, 2014Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Everyone that writes code has encountered or written their fair share of undocumented code. A failure twice? I was encouraged to write this article because of something I read about the pinball game that once was included with windows. According to the article on MSDN, the pinball game was removed…

Generating JSON Documents From SQLite Databases In Python

By chad June 22, 2014Programming, Tips3 Comments

Special Note This article assumes that you do not wish to use a more sophisticated ORM tool such as SQLAlchemy. Some Setup Let's start with a Q&D sqlite database given the following sql. create table sample(column1 INTEGER, column2 TEXT, column3 TEXT, column4 REAL); insert into sample(column2, column2, column3, column4) values(1,…

DNS Changer And What It Means To You

By chad July 7, 2012Featured, TipsNo Comments

With all the fear mongering by the news outlets, I thought I'd make a short post about DNS Changer. DNS Changer is malware that if you are infected it changes how your computer looks up website addresses. Essentially, it tells your computer to use a service setup by criminals. The…

FFMPEG Improperly Switching to Grayscale

By chad April 22, 2012Technology, TipsNo Comments

I use ffmpeg to make timelapse movies of images taken from one of my several webcams. Recently, I started having trouble with it converting all the frames of my video to gray scale. I'm am unsure if a software upgrade or a script change caused it, but I had a…