Sorting a dictionary by value

Sorting a dictionary by value is a task that I have to perform once in a while. Today I was looking for a good solution to this problem and found this blog entry. This hack is very convenient and also very fast.

from operator import itemgetter
alist = sorted(d[idx].iteritems(), key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True)

If you use itemgetter(0) you can sort by key. Should take a deeper look into the operator module.

Was Österreich kann, aber Deutschland nicht!

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TaskPaper

A nice program to organize the things you want to get done is TaskPaper. It allows easy handling of to-do lists in the "Getting things done"spirit. The application is usable and very easy to handle. I do not use complex and feature-rich applications such as the free iGTD or the commercial Things on a regular basis. It's to laborious to adjust for each item in the to-do-list the duration, alarm time, and priority. It's the simplicity, stupid!

Gmail and Mac OS X Mail Application

I had some troubles with my Gmail account when the Mac OS X Mail application has been used. The label/folder assignment did not work - in the Gmail web interface draft emails (created with the Mail app) appeared as actually sent. Fortunately, it turned out, that they were not set. A nice hint to the proper configuration came from here but also the Google help provides useful information. Now things work very nice again.