This was a bit painful and not well documented, so documenting here for future reference.

Say you want to parse and normalize dates with timezones (eg. dates in email headers, I believe based on rfc822). Here's what you do:

Install pytz.

import email, time, datetime
import pytz
utctimestamp = email.Utils …

Obama continues to impress me. Listen to this speech on religion - he actually speaks in intelligent terms, assumes an intelligent audience, and refuses to take a divisive, one-sided stance.

Bella is an interesting movie. It flashes back and forth in time - my uncle commented the direction reminded him of 21 grams. It strikes a nice balance of being obvious and mysterious at the same time. Worth watching.

I'm finally getting a chance to actually implement map/reduce instead of read or write about it. General impressions so far:

• Hadoop is fairly easy to install and get running.
• The choice of Java as the default programming language feels strange to me. It'd feel more natural in Perl, Python …

No Country For Old Men is an odd film. The film ends and you're sitting there thinking: huh, that was strange…

The next day: that was a good movie, I should watch it again…

The following day: That was a great movie!

It's the quintessential non-hollywood movie, consistently doing things …

The boys (4 and 5 years old) got the Shrek the Third game for the Wii a month or two ago and have been enjoying it since. It's a great game for young gamers; the controls are easy and the game is very playable. It doesn't throw artificial frustrating roadblocks …

I send my older son to get my middle son so they can get to bed. The conversation that ensues:

"My dad needs you upstairs"

"Why, did I do something bad?"

"No, just come upstairs"

"Why?"

"He wants you to brush your teeth"

"Did you brush your teeth?"

"No, just …

Facebook grew by providing a safe-haven from spam, an access controlled area where interactions could be limited to those desired by the user.

Facebook respected users, famously limiting the amount of advertising to protect the user experience.

The Facebook platform was brilliant, bringing immense value to the system.

Now, however …

DSLs pop up as a Good Thing(TM) every once in a while. I'm not entirely opposed to DSLs - there are certainly many cases where they make a lot of sense. But I am opposed to them as a general, let's throw it in there kind of tool.

The problem …

John Resig's post on JavaScript Engine Speeds got me thinking - there are a lot of solid implementations of the JavaScript language specification. Is JavaScript the language with the most implementations? Are there any other languages that have as many runtimes or as many implementations of the language specification?

I'm with Dick on this one: ideal office space for a startup is a big fishbowl with no/few offices. Read Dick's post for the benefits; I largely agree with everything he says.

For what it's worth, Overture used to be the-whole-floor-is-one-big-open-space-with-no-cubicles, so it can be scaled to much larger …

Scaling requires the ability to decompose apps into pieces which can be spread across multiple boxes. An application composed of multiple pieces needs an efficient, reliable way to communicate between the pieces.

With multiple cores now standard, even in a single box scenario we need pieces that can run independently …

We've been using Cisco Telepresence systems for a month or two at work. I have to say, I'm a believer.

My previous experience with video conferencing had left me unimpressed at best. Choppy video in a small screen, not worth the time nor effort.

The cisco system consists of half …

I started using Jott this morning and so far I like it. It's a simple service - you call a toll free number, record a 15 second message, Jott transcribes it, and sends it to you in email as both an audio and a text file.

I thought it might be …

My impressions of the MacBook Pro after 24 hours. This is my first Mac and I have virtually no previous experience with Mac or OS X.

The laptop itself: solid. Almost attractive; certainly nicer than the run-of-the-mill black plastic PCs.

Heavy. Much heavier than I had expected.

Hot! This thing …

Watched Pursuit of Happyness the other night. My wife summed it up beautifully: it's an Indian movie. That is: it's a monotone of bad, sad, down-on-your-luck, with a final redemeption.

This could've been a much better movie if they didn't maintain the monotone. Throw in a couple of ups and …

My laptop broke, leading to a visit to fatwallet, leading to the same old frustration with the lack of a notifier for specific new deals. I decided to finally put together a deal watcher.

I started with the python Universal Feed Reader, which makes it amazingly simple to deal with …

As I was moderating the 37 pieces of comment spam I received this morning (must've been a hiccup in Akismet) I was struck by how much the activity resembles reading RSS feeds. Quick scan of the contents, followed by an action. Not to mention the abundance of junk in both …

Just last week I was calling for someone to hack up the Wiimote for PC use, and lo-and-behold, it's here!

Hack-a-day gives an overview, Wii Hacks has lots of different hacks, and Bob Somers has even build a Wiimote Drum Machine.

Apparently you grab the GlovePIE program, get yourself a …

I tried Yahoo Answers when it first came out (I'm a Yahoo employee so I got a sneak preview). Interesting concept, I thought, let's see how it turns out.

I checked it out every once in a while and wasn't impressed - the questions are generally junk and the answers aren't …