Sundry Links for November 1, 2014

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!): I guess the title says it all. By Joel Spolsky.

Unix Shells - Hyperpolyglot: Very cool comparison of basic command syntax in Bash, Fish, Ksh, Tcsh, and Zsh.

Better Bash history: I’m pretty stuck on Bash at the moment. Here’s a way to get a better history in Bash. (Other shells often improve on Bash’s history.)

usaddress 0.1: I always love seeing a Python library for something I’ve tried to do poorly on my own: “usaddress is a python library for parsing unstructured address strings into address components, using advanced NLP methods.”

more-itertools: A great extension to the helpful itertools module in Python. Some particularly helpful functions: chunked, first, peekaboo, and take. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have Python 3 support at the moment.