mysettings = __import__("config.mysettings", fromlist=["config"])

This is equivalent to

from config import mysetings

• Open the OS X Preview app
• Go to the File menu and select Import From Scanner
• Select your printer
• Look for the “Format” option on the right hand page and set it to PDF
• Select the “Create single document” option
• Hit the Scan button

This will produce a single PDF file with all of the pages of your document, scanned into the location of your choice.

Here’s how you see your log messages:

adb logcat | grep "TiAPI"

adb is in the tools directory of your Android sdk.

javascript:void(document.cookie=prompt(document.cookie,document.cookie));

Via stackoveflow.

You can check if a user is part of a group using this simple snippet. It will allow you to check if a user is in a group with the following template syntax:

{% if user|in_group:"Friends,Enemies" %}

This afternoon driving by the high school near my house I was amused to see uniforms everywhere – here a patch of girls all wearing the same types of shorts, with hair pulled back, there a group of emo kids all wearing shades of near identical clothes.

It’s lovely. We all need to be different in our uniform ways.

I’ve made a career of working far from where I live. I’ve generally considered this a significant pain – there are disadvantages and inefficiencies in being geographically separated from coworkers. Hence I’ve endured horrible commutes and frequent travel.

Lately, however, I’ve been reconsidering. My office is about 30 minutes from my house, but I end up not going in more and more these days. The 1 hour roundtrip is simply wasted time, and the traditional 9-5 is an artificial constraint on both work and non-work activities.

The turning point, not surprisingly, was technology driven – earlier this year I was working on a shared presentation and document with 2 colleagues. We met in person twice, and the third time we used Google Wave (rip) for shared document editing and iChat for voice and video communication.

I was shocked at how much more efficient the third session was. I despise video calls, but in this case it was background, mainly to see who was paying attention and who was tuned out. The shared document with real-time edits worked fabulously well – one could write stream of consciousness thoughts, and before finishing the paragraph have his work edited and polished by the other two.

These days I find my most efficient working relationships require little in-person interaction. What they do require is a host of enabling technologies we take for granted.

I’m still a huge believer in the value of in-person interactions – the best ideas generally pop up over lunch or other informal settings. But in-person interaction doesn’t require the traditional office setting and trappings.

The work style adopted by startups today will make its way to large business, and the services that are the lifeline of that style will become the dial-tone of business. As Paul points out this will drive the creation of a number of significant companies to provide those dial-tones. And with any luck I’ll have an opportunity to invest if a few of them

• Markdown reference

Generating static html:

import markdown2
file('classification.html','w').write( markdown2.markdown_path('classification.md', extras=["code-friendly"]) )