If you do any Python development, you’ll probably run into an awful lot of package installation instructions that read:

To install, use pip:

pip install engineer

Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but what is pip? And what is this virtualenv thing people keep telling me I should use?

If you’re new to Python, getting up and running with pip and virtualenv can be a challenge, especially on Windows. Many guides I’ve seen out there assume either a) you’re working on Linux or UNIX or b) you already have pip/setuptools installed, or you know how to install packages and manage virtualenv. Heck, when I was learning this I didn’t even know what pip was! Having gone through this process several times now, I decided to write it all down from the beginning in the hopes that it’ll be useful to someone in the future.

I’ve just put up a small side project I whipped together over the last day or so called xkcd 2. It might not make much sense why I built this thing, so bear with me while I try to explain.

Why

I’ve been reading xkcd for years, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that I discovered most of the comics actually have a caption.¹ It’s tucked away in the title attribute on the img tag, and in most browsers you really only see it if you hover your mouse over the image for a few seconds.

Discovering this was a total accident. I read most xkcd comics via the RSS feed in Reeder. If you zoom-pinch on an image in Reeder, it opens up a view like this:

An xkcd.com comic in Reeder

That panel at the bottom displays the title attribute, but it only shows up if you tap once on the image. Anyway, after coming across this in Reeder, I started looking at all the captions every time a new comic would come out. It turns out that in many cases the caption is funnier than the comic itself. Case in point: comic 1049, the one featured in the picture above, is my most recent favorite. The caption perfectly mirrors my own experience with Ayn Rand, and in my opinion makes the comic that much more interesting as a whole.