Fort Collins, my hometown, "where renewal is a way of life" (ugh), is going through a branding fiasco. Check out the lifeless new logo below:

But maybe we should be grateful: it could have been much much worse (or better, for comedians). Thanks for the link, Josh.

Here's the neighborhood vulture roost at sunset, with half of the birds still incoming.

As we did last year, we're regularly one light-colored Buteo soaring with the vultures when they return, and occasionally a second. Ferruginous Hawks, from their markings, and we speculate that they might be using the vulture flock as cover while hunting prairie dogs and jackrabbits. I know I would, in their shoes.

This came up in my Google blog search feed today:

If you are into [P]ython, GIS and [D]jango then you must check out GeoDjango.

For real.

Stuff like this makes me really want to get going in the python world.

Huh? You don't even use Python? This is like me telling people where to go for a good fast food burger.

One thing that nobody has mentioned is how much the OGC needed KML standardization. KML originates from 100,000 different domains? I don't know how many domains provide WxS, but I'll eat my keyboard if it's 10,000. I'm guessing it's closer to 1000.

Previously, you didn't know about the OGC unless you were near the SDI scene. This raises its profile by several orders of magnitude.

Kurt's getting his garden started too. Are people from a farming or gardening tradition more likely to cultivate open source software?

Kurt Schwer says:

Perl programmers are assumed to know regular expressions. I think python programmers should get more exposure to regular expressions.

So, this morning I needed to process a KML document, adding IDs derived from a name element to all parent Placemark elements. Python's regular expressions aren't as expressive or as built in as Perl's, but there's nothing you can't do by using a callable object as the second argument to re.sub. To convert this:

<Placemark>
  <name>B5</name>
  ...
</Placemark>

to this:

<Placemark id="b5">
  <name>B5</name>
  ...
</Placemark>

I just executed the following statements at the interpreter prompt:

>>> kmlin = open('temp.kml').read()
>>> def sub_id(m):
...     g = m.groups()
...     return '<Placemark id="%s">%s<name>%s' % (g[1].lower(), g[0], g[1])
...
>>> import re
>>> kmlout = re.sub(r'<Placemark>(\s+)<name>(\w\d)', sub_id, kmlin)
>>> f = open('grid.kml', 'w')
>>> f.write(kmlout)
>>> f.close()

The fava beans we planted 16 days ago finally came up yesterday. They have been delayed by cold weather: April has been a bit wintry in spite of the La Niña. Recent prognostic discussion credits the MJO (Madden-Julien Oscillation) with modulating the affect of this La Niña on the continental US. The spinach is doing well, a few turnips survived, but no carrots at all. We'll sow again this afternoon.

I'm changing the license on my blog from cc by-sa 2.5 to by-sa 3.0. You are free to share and remix the content of my blog, including code and data examples. In return, please attribute my work. On the Web, simply link to my work's URI. Off the Web (paper docs, slide shows, etc), place my name and the source URI, or an equivalent citation, in the text near my work or the derived work. For example:

Sean Gillies, http://sgillies.net/blog/733/attribution

Thank you.

Heads explode as Adena Schutzberg links to the Great Orange Satan.

Meme of the day. Why not:

sean@lenny:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a)
> {printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  113   ls
   72   cd
   65   hg
   30   svn
   25   ssh
   23   sudo
   21   gvim
   19   paster
   14   python
   14   ./bin/instance

That last one is a Plone buildout server controller and test runner.

history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a) {printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' | sort -rn | head
   94   l
   93   cd
   55   sudo
   51   exit
   22   grass63
   14   ssh
   11   rm
   11   ps
    9   aptitude
    8   svn