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Over and Out Rag

Here’s a rough cut of the only song on the Hanson book I really like.

Over and Out Rag

Book: The Art of Contemporary Travis Picking

This is mainly geared towards playing guitar as an accompaniment to singing. Only a few of the songs are fun to play by themselves.

A Poetry Transformation Server

Part 12: A Poetry Transformation Server

This continues the introduction started in the first part. You can find an index to the entire series.

One More Server

Alright, we’ve written one Twisted server so let’s write another, and then we’ll get back to learning some more about Deferreds.

In Parts 9 and 10 we introduced the idea of a poetry transformation engine. The one we eventually implemented, the cummingsifier, was so simple we had to add random exceptions to simulate a failure. But if the transformation engine was located on another server, providing a network “poetry transformation service”, then there is a much more realistic failure mode: the transformation server is down.

Your Poetry is Served

Part 11: Your Poetry is Served

This continues the introduction started in the first part. You can find an index to the entire series.

A Twisted Poetry Server

Now that we’ve learned so much about writing clients with Twisted, let’s turn around and re-implement our poetry server with Twisted too. And thanks to the generality of Twisted’s abstractions, it turns out we’ve already learned almost everything we need to know. Take a look at our Twisted poetry server located in twisted-server-1/fastpoetry.py. It’s called fastpoetry because this server sends the poetry as fast as possible, without any delays at all. Note there’s significantly less code than in the client!

Book: The City & The City

A fine detective story with a premise that requires some heavy lifting in the suspension-of-disbelief area. Thanks Amy!

Book: Disgrace: A Novel

A short but remarkably powerful novel.

Book: Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

The Quest for the Foundations of Mathematics, in comic book form. Great stuff.

Book: Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . .: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

A very short skim through philosophy,  illustrated with jokes. Funnier than it sounds.

Poetry Transformed

Part 10: Poetry Transformed

This continues the introduction started in the first part. You can find an index to the entire series.

Client 5.0

Now we’re going to add some transformation logic to our poetry client, along the lines suggested in Part 9. But first, I have a shameful and humbling confession to make: I don’t know how to write the Byronification Engine. It is beyond my programming abilities. So instead, I’m going to implement a simpler transformation, the Cummingsifier. The Cummingsifier is an algorithm that takes a poem and returns a new poem like the original but written in the style of e.e. cummings. Here is the Cummingsifier algorithm in its entirety:

Book: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Love him or hate him, the dude can write a sentence. Personally, I’m in the love camp.