As usual, some attempt to share my efforts making an even slightly informed decision about voting. More blather about propositions later.

Getting submissions to a Google Form to appear in a Slack chat is straightforward. You can use services like Zapier to do this, but it turns out to be easy to use Google’s scripting interface to get instant message-pushing without a third-party tool.

BotBot.me is a logging IRC bot. Scaleway provides bare-metal ARM servers for €3/mo. Can we combine them? We can!

Comrades of the Data Liberation Front rejoice! I come to report a successful action against the campaign finance records of the City of Irvine.

tl;dr: Please use -undefined dynamic_lookup instead of -lpython or -framework Python to build Python extension modules on OS X, no matter what python-config says. Only use -lpython or -framework Python if you intend to embed an interpreter.

Python 3.5 is scheduled to be released on September 13, 2015. Since Homebrew carries the newest stable version of its packages, the Homebrew python3 formula will adopt Python 3.5 very quickly upon its release. This post explains how migrating to Python 3.5 will affect Homebrew users who have set up a Python 3 development environment using Homebrew packages.

What would you do with 2 petaflops of processing power? It’s not an idle question: NSF’s XSEDE infrastructure offers researchers access to large-scale computing resources. I spent the last week at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which hosts an annual Summer Institute to introduce scientists from many disciplines to high-performance computing technologies. Tissue engineering doesn’t have a lot of petascale problems but I did learn a lot about tools that can help me write more performant code on single and multi-processor systems—even in Python, my favorite programming language. ~And~ I got to take a selfie with a supercomputer.