Simon Willison’s Weblog

optfunc. Command line parsing libraries in Python such as optparse frustrate me because I can never remember how to use them without consulting the manual. optfunc is a new experimental interface to optparse which works by introspecting a function definition (including its arguments and their default values) and using that to construct a command line argument parser. Feedback and suggestions welcome! 28th May 2009, 7:38 pm

peeping into memcached. “Peep uses ptrace to freeze a running memcached server, dump the internal key metadata, and return the server to a running state”—you can then load the resulting data in to MySQL using LOAD LOCAL INFILE and analyse it using standard SQL queries. 20th April 2009, 6:35 pm

Django documentation bookmarklets. James Bennett continues his month-long series of daily Django tutorials with documentation for one of Django’s best kept secrets: application introspection HTTP headers and bookmarklets that make use of them. 8th November 2007, 10:59 am