In python, the easiest way to time your code is to do the following:

from datetime import datetime
start = datetime.now()
# Some long-running process
end = datetime.now()
print "process run in %s" % (end - start)

This solution works, but it can be annoying to write, and you’ll have to remove the debug lines before you ship your code to production. Once or twice, this is okay. But doing it over and over again can get annoying.

Do this in one line:

with timer() as t:
    print "Hello, world!"
    # Some long-running process.

which returns

Hello world!
process run in 0:00:00.001030

It’s cleaner, and you can easily toggle it if your application is off of DEBUG mode. Code below:

from datetime import datetime
import time
 
class timer:
    def __enter__(self):
        self.start = datetime.now()
        return self
 
    def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
        self.end = datetime.now()
        print "time: %s" % (self.end - self.start)
 
with timer() as t:
    print "Hello, World!"
    time.sleep(2)

or gist.

By drudgery, I mean work that in itself is not pleasant, that has no immediate effect in stimulating our best powers, and that only remotely serves the purpose of our general advancement. Such a definition may not be perfect, but it expresses with reasonable accuracy what we usually understand by the term.

Now, if this is what we mean by drudgery, it is clear that we are all drudges. We all have to do many things, day by day, which we would rather not do. Even in the callings that seem to present the most perfect correspondence between gifts and work, such as those of the writer or the artist, drudgery dogs the heels of all progress…We show some perception of these facts in our common sayings, that easy writing makes hard reading, and what costs a man little is usually worth little. But few of us have any adequate sense of the immense toil which lies behind the brilliant successes of the great artist or famous writer. And the same thing might be said of the lives of great statesmen, politicians, reformers, merchants, and memorable men in all walks of life. Examine such lives, and the amount of prolonged toil which lies behind all the glitter of public fame is enormous, and to the indolent even appalling. If any man of the Elizabethan period gives the impression of having achieved great things with a certain airy ease and instinctive facility of touch, it is Walter Raleigh. Yet it was of Raleigh that Elizabeth said, “he could toil terribly.” The same thing may be said of every great man, so that it is small wonder that we have learned to believe that genius itself is simply an infinite capacity for taking pains.

When a man grumbles about the drudgery of his lot, then I am entitled to conclude that he has not learned the discipline of work, and that it is native indolence rather than suppressed genius which chafes against the limitations of his environment. Browning, in his poem of The Statue and the Bust, has laid down the doctrine that it is a man’s wisdom to contend to the uttermost even for the meanest prize that may be within his reach, because by such strenuous contention manhood grows, and by the lack of it manhood decays.

The clerk who does not strive to be the best clerk in the office, the carpenter who is not emulous of being the best carpenter in the workshop, is not likely to achieve excellence in any other pursuit for which he imagines his superior talents better fitted….I have little faith in the youth who is always crying out against his condition, and telling an incredulous world what great things he could do if his lot were different. The boast of general talents for everything usually resolves itself into particular talents for nothing. The incompetent clerk, in nine cases out of ten, would be equally incompetent as writer, artist, or speaker. If I were adjured to help a youth to some sphere supposed to be better suited to his gifts, I should first of all need to be convinced that he had performed faithfully the duties of the inferior sphere in which he found himself. The superior talent always shows itself in the superior performance of inferior duties. It is the man who is faithful in little things to whom there is given authority over larger things. He who has never learned the art of drudgery is never likely to acquire the faculty of great and memorable work, since the greater a man is, the greater is his power of drudgery.

But the gains of drudgery are not seen only in the solid successes of life, but in their effect upon the man himself. Let me take in illustration a not infrequent case. Suppose a man gives up his youth to the struggle for some coveted degree, some honour or award of the scholarly life. It is very possible that when he obtains that for which he has struggled, he may find that the joy of possession is not so great as the joy of the strife. It is part of the discipline of life that we should be educated by disillusion; we press onward to some shining summit, only to find that it is but a bastion thrown out by a greater mountain, which we did not see, and that the real summit lies far beyond us still. But are we the worse for the struggle? No; we are manifestly the better, for by whatever illusion we have been led onward, it is at least clear that without the illusion we should not have stood as high as we do. So a man may either fail or succeed in gaining the prize which he covets; but he cannot help being the gainer in himself. He has not attained, but he has fitted himself for attaining. It is better to fail in achieving a great thing than to succeed in achieving a little one, and the struggle that fails is, in any case, to be preferred to the stolidity which never aspires. And why? Because the struggle is sure to develop certain great and noble qualities in ourselves. Thus, though such a man may not gain the prize he sought, he has gained a command over his chance desires, a discipline of thought, a power of patient application, a steadiness of will and purpose, which will stand him in good stead throughout whatever toils his life may know in the hidden years which lie before it. And even if he gain the prize he sought, the real prize is found not in a degree, a certificate, a brief taste of applause on a commemoration day, but in the deeper strength of soul, the wider range of wisdom, which the long discipline of unflagging effort has taught him. So true is this, that Lessing, who was among the wisest of thinkers, said, that if he had to choose between the attainment of truth and the search for truth, he would prefer the latter. The true gain is always in the struggle, not the prize. What we become must always rank as a far higher question than what we get.

[...] The rise of microtargeting is a function of new logarithms—and computers fast enough to process them—that are able to capture all this trash and turn it into gold. Over the years, the data-mining industry has become adept at recycling information about the websites we visit and the products we buy. Rumor has it that some high-end companies, including Omaha Steaks, can now make more money by selling their customer pedigrees to data-mining firms than they can from selling their product

via good.is.

Interesting read. It’s a bit higher-level than I would have hoped, but it does a great job introducing some of the many ways that organizations are leveraging seemingly minute, uncorrelated data in ways that will add values to organizations.

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Brilliant. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, ”bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” More info on the railway on Wikipedia.

def cache(func):
""" A thin middleware that caches based on function name and arguments. """
    def _inner(*args, **kwargs):
        a_str = "&".join([str(a) or None for a in args])
        kw_str = "&".join(["%s=%s" for key, val in kwargs.iteritems()])
        key_name = slugify("%s:%s:%s" % (func.__name__, a_str, kw_str))
        cached = cache.get(key_name)
        if not cached:
            cached = func(*args, **kwargs)
            cache.set(key_name, cached)
        return cached
    return _inner

This is designed with django in mind, but you can replace cache.set and cache.get with any cache cache framework of your choice. Also, I use slugify because many cache frameworks don’t like spaces in cache key names. Slugify replaces them with dashes.

Usage is simple:

@cache
def expensive_method(a,b=True):
    ...

Third, meditation can help a man “be his own man” and feel comfortable in his own skin.  That constant stream of input we face each day often carries messages of what we’re supposed to think or feel.  Talking-heads spout off opinions as if they were facts. Advertisers try to convince us that buying such-and-such product will make us feel more virile and manly. Meditation allows us to be alone with our own thoughts and discover what we really think about the world and ourselves.

via Art of Manliness

Open up a terminal, copy and paste this:

sudo echo "127.0.0.1\tfacebook.com\n127.0.0.1\treddit.com" >> /etc/hosts

I installed Marco Polo today. It seems like a useful application, but it left me wondering. What are some ways to represent decisions that involve uncertainty in user interfaces?

The first mental framework that came to mind was the different types of measurement scales. An ordinal scale might make sense, but it’s hard to order things when there might not be an inherent ordering. Ratio and Interval wouldn’t do the trick here. At the same time, this nominal scale just doesn’t work in my mind.

iTunes has a nice interface for building playlists.

It’s an interface for defining and setting rules; maybe this would be more appropriate for Marco Polo’s interface? To go a little bit deeper, what does it mean to have 50% confidence that my Monitor is Color LCD?

I’m curious about this now. What are some other common UIs that involve making decisions based on uncertainty?

Logical information sharing.

Information sharing is a two-piece puzzle. It’s about the systems behind the social graph (which trust me, can probably already figure out who my Virginia friends are and separate them from my Beirut friends), but even more importantly, my experience of knowing that the system can segment my friends into groups.

It’s cool if a system knows who is related to whom, but that’s only half of the puzzle. I, the user, have to know about this as well, and I have to have absolute trust in the system. I have to know the boundaries of my social circles, and I need an explicit agreement with the system that shows me who is in which group. For a while, I was skeptical of the answer being a better UI, but this might just be the winning solution.

It’s slightly uncanny, because up until this point, my claim is that Google Plus wins because the system can segment my friends into circles. This seems strange, because with all of Facebook’s engineering talent, they have to have been able to figure out how to do this automatically. Splitting people up into groups is a problem solved by computer scientists time and time again.

I recall watching a friend make a Facebook list – few people do it, but those who do it tend to be engaged with the lists for the long term. My hypothesis is that once a user knows who is and is not in a specific list (or circle, as we call it now), we will see medium-to-long term increases in that user’s engagement.

Posting something on facebook takes me a lot of thought; I deal with some internal strife. One must “write with their audience in mind”, which is absolutely true. Google Plus lets me segment my audience, which is why I like it a lot.

Systems are interesting – they’re about the underlying technology, but more importantly, the involved stakeholders (in this case: end users). Up until this point, nobody has created a system that lets the user feel in control of their social circles. Algorithms can easily match this, but my premise is that it’s more importnat for the user to feel some semblance of control. A user who knows exactly who is (and perhaps even more importantly, whois not) in a social circle, is more willing to share things.

I used to be an avid LiveJournal user. My friends and I were active livejournal users around the time we were in middle school and early high school (ages 13-16). I downloaded my old posts and was surprised to see what I was sharing. I went into every detail of my life. Everything, from the track meets I ran in, my academic performance, down to the girls I had a crush on. Even more interesting was the fact that out of over 1,000 posts, only 20 of them had no privacy settings whatsoever.

Only 20. That means that 98% of my interaction with LiveJournal involved posting content to specific groups. I was comfortable sharing everything because I knew that a rant about somebody, for example, would not get into that person’s feed.

I felt the same way yesterday. I posted something to Google Plus, into my California Social Circle. These are my San Francisco friends. Nobody from Beirut. Nobody from UVa. Only people who would find it relevant. Strangely enough, I felt completely comfortable doing it. Even more interesting was I had a lot more feedback than I would have gotten if I had put it on Facebook or Twitter.

Interesting! Sounds like the SNR is down. Well done, Google Plus.