Comments on: My plan to stay relevant (and employed)

By: Calvin C. Chan

Calvin C. Chan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:24:32 +0000

My suggestions:
- Processing (http://processing.org): data visualization for appealing ways to present your stories
- Automator (comes with Mac): is a versatile environment that can do the WAV > M4A workflow. You can embed some Python and other shell scripts into your workflow too.
- Javascript and JQuery: if you want to build simple web-based interactive experience.

p.s. I love Python too

By: Stephanie Hobson

Stephanie Hobson — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:59:09 +0000

What you’re saying sounds a lot like some of what I heard Adrian Holovaty (http://www.holovaty.com/) say at a conference once. You might find a little inspiration in his work. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/jun/06/futureofjournalismadrianh

He mentioned this small project in his talk. When he was still at the Washington Post it was his team’s attempt to put a face to every fallen soldier in Iraq because the names stopped being reported as the casualties mounted: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/

He’s most famous for his site Chicago crime which hooked bits of data from the Chicago police department into Google Maps. The project has morphed into the giant http://www.everyblock.com/ which takes “hooking bits of the web together” to whole new levels.

Good luck with python!

By: Dan Misener

Dan Misener — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:07:25 +0000

I don’t have a solid idea yet, but I’d love to create a simple MP3 -> M4A chapterized podcast tool for Spark. I’d feed it a linear wav file, and chapter metadata, and it’d spit out multiple version of the show (regular bitrate MP3, low bitrate MP3, chapterized podcast, etc.).

More generally speaking, I’m most interested in the “hooking bits of the web together in interesting ways” types of projects.

By: Dan Misener

Dan Misener — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:03:02 +0000

Thanks Chad. Just downloaded. I also have a copy of Python for Absolute Beginners on hold at the TPL.

By: Chad

Chad — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:52:14 +0000

When Hacklab was having weekly tutorials on Python – Leigh was using this free textbook: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

By: Gustavius

Gustavius — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:15:02 +0000

I agree with Peter J.

Do you have a specific project in mind?

By: Peter J.

Peter J. — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:58:31 +0000

Dive Into Python is a must-read for Python 2; I'd imagine that Dive Into Python 3 is similarly relevant for the new release. The best way I've found to learn a language is to have a personally-interesting project to build with it. For C (a long, long time ago) it was a program that could conjugate French verbs. For Python there were two, a weblog ping server that would send me notifications of new blog entries over IM using XMPP (aka Jabber, aka the protocol behind Google Chat) and a tool that would read blog feeds and send their contents out as email.