Monthly Archives: August 2016

Today’s subway reading from 1953

Books, Pals, ,

I picked up some old Amazing Stories magazines up at a flea market in Woodstock. 


Robert Sheckley and Richard Matheson – I’m sold!

charles the robot mourning mark
The Robert Sheckley story Beside Still Waters has great art by Virgil Finlay

Beside Still Waters is a sweet story of a lonely asteroid miner dying. Full of mystery and possibilities.  I wonder why Sheckley never became a bigger deal?

The Richard Matheson story is weird- an infant daughter falls into another dimension during the night and is rescued. Mostly by the family dog. The last sentence is a puzzle for me. 

So some night we may look up and hear Arthur Godfrey chuckling from another dimension. 

What? Do not understand. 

Wow, that kinda casual sexism don’t fly these days.

Backing up a SalesForce instance

Dev, Python, ,

SalesForce is an interesting beast. You gotta work within its limits, and it is great within them. As soon as you want to venture outside of the normal flow, things get complicated.

They suck  into SalesForce, but never out – it’s designed as a lobster trap for your information.

Weirdly, there’s not much on the SalesForce AppExchange that helps you easily back up your data on site. There are some tools that help you easily back up to another cloud, but little that helps you get your data back within your own walls.

Still, there’s a little layer over the SalesForce API in Python called simple-salesforce. Here’s a quick script I threw together to help put all your data into csv files.