Creosote archive for Wed 29 of Sep, 2004

data oriented application framework

awesome locally-running web search proxy written in Python

Beware! Danger lies ahead...

"A superior alternative to the classic "Make" build tool that we all know and love."

ATAudio provides an audio content type for Plone. Add MP3 audio files to a Plone site, and let your users download and stream the audio files. Audio is stored on disk and metadata is handled automatically.

"As you can probably guess, yes, in Python."

Time for some WCK programming. The following snippet implements a simple text widget, which can display a single paragraph of text: from WCK import Widget, FONT, FOREGROUND class SimpleTextView(Widget): ui_option_text = "" ui_option_width = 200 ui_option_height = 100 ui_option_font = FONT ui_option_foreground = FOREGROUND def ui_handle_config(self): self.font = self.ui_font( self.ui_option_foreground, self.ui_option_font ) return int(self.ui_option_width), int(self.ui_option_height) def ui_handle_repair(self, draw, x0, y0, x1, y1): space = draw.textsize(" ", self.font)[0] words = self.ui_option_text.split() x = y = 0 for word in words: # check size of this word w, h = draw.textsize(word, self.font) # figure out where to draw it if x: x += space if x + w > x1: # new line x = 0 y += h draw.text((x, y), word, self.font) x += w The repair code treats the text as a single paragraph, consisting of one long list of words. Note that the code always draws words that start at the left margin, even if they won't fit on the line.

A good case study in optimizing and profiling

a python web framework that I should investigate further

$ tail -f logfile tail: The size of the file has changed during the run of tail. $ more logfile ... cc -I include -c command.c cc -I include -c component.c rm -f library.a ar rc library.a component.o ar: Error: library.a not in archive format cc -o command command.o library.a ld: Can't read file: command.o (Successful) ...

Well, it finally happened. UserLand has release Frontier as open source. GPL, no less. I'm honored to have been asked to participate, I just wish I could do more.

Well, this one wasn't so bad... at least not for us. This time, the power was only out for two days.

I am looking for a light weight java servlet based wiki that I can use to "embed" in an existing web application.  My basic requirements are: Servlet based but not 2.3 servlet... I have to run it on an older version of Jetty which isn't up to the latest and greatest servlet api. No JSP stuff .. see above No database behind it ..

"The complete Python source code for BlogMatrix Jäger is now available. Jäger is an extensible, one-panel weblog aggregator designed for speed and ease of use. The application takes only a small amount of screen real estate and uses a browser to display blog entries. The GUI is implemented using wxPython and runs on both Windows and Macintosh. With a few minor updates, Jäger should run under Linux also."

The 'why' and the 'how' of business processes explores the relationship between state machines and control logic and in particular, what we can usefully visualize and what we cannot.

[ via BuzzMachine ] Excite founder Joe Kraus has started a blog about life as an entrepeneur

It looks like the X-Prize is going to be celebrating my birthday by launching a private spacecraft into suborbital space. Scaled Composites will be launching SpaceShipOne at 6:00am (Pacific time) this Wednesday. There's even a live webcast; I may try...

I've done a bunch of work on py2app the past couple days. It's probably in a state where it could be used for a legitimate project, but I'm not going to provide any real support it yet. If you do play with it, you will need to also check out the latest macholib. New stuff: dylib dependency hunting and rewriting standalone (for non-vendor python builds) data resources icon template plist file, plistlib.Plist, or dict alias build mode (similar to but better than bundlebuilder --symlink) can avoid modulefinder (when using alias build mode) Python 2.4 support dylib/framework includes semi-standalone option when using non-system Python argv emulation chdir to Resources folder (or not) Still missing: Non-zip distribution mode Plugins (preference panes, etc.) Including full packages Still haven't tried anything non-trivial dylib/framework excludes baked-in "recipes" for common problematic packages (PIL, for example) a couple minor bundlebuilder options (creator, bundle-id, strip)

I had a splendid weekend with Sadie's parents and then bumping around Harvard Square on Sunday. I did some studying for the GRE, but mostly took a couple of days off from doing work. I also finished up overhauling all the code on DarkRifts to work with the MudOS v.22.2b14 driver. There's a huge amount of code and there were a lot of problems most of which are sorted out now.

msoffice2ps is a Python module for conversion of Microsoft Office documents to Postscript. It uses win32com and pythoncom from pywin32 (Marc Hammond) to print out Office documents to a specified Postscipt printer.

PyRobots is a slight variation on gnurobots. The game consists of programming a robot which is in a dungeon trying to find its way out. It has limited energy, so it must constantly scavenge energy to keep itself functioning. There are also baddies in the dungeon trying to hurt the robot, and bonuses to increase the robot's score. The robot's main goal is to exit the dungeon. PyRobots was developed because: (a) I can't stand Lisp/Scheme (b) development of gnurobots has ceased and I believe that redoing it in Python will make it easier to complete. Unfortunately I don't have sufficient time to continue the project so I need a new developer to take over. Experience in Twisted and OOP required, GUI experience is a plus.

I went looking for a wiki to install. From the list of choices, it seems like everyone who does that winds up making their own! I choose Pwyky, a small and elegant wiki written in Python. Yay! Thanks Sean! I'm soon to be in the market for a CMS or blog thing. Python powered preferred. Plone? It's too early to tell...

Here you will find a simple Python class that I wrote to test performance of various different sorting techniques. In this case: list, heapq, and bisect. For printing out data, I make use of the very cool decimal module to limit errant floating point numbers with many digits. It helps me decide when I want to think about different types of sorts. Python's list.sort is so good that generally you are not going to want to write your own sort, and instead use it and some of the new features recently added to it. However, with a list.sort you pay for sorting at retrieval time. A different type of sort using data structures to sort at creation time instead of retrieval can offer some performance characteristics, that may make one consider them instead.

A simple class to represent a Quicken (QIF) file, and a parser to load a QIF file into a sequence of those classes. It's enough to be useful for writing conversions.

Unununium is a an operating system, striving to create a better computing environment by maximizing interconnection between components. Unununium was created in the belief that no currently available OS had the elegance of design required to realize the full potential of computers. In all popular operating systems, the general environment is the same: a global and rather simple filesystem and a number of applications to manipulate these files. At first it seems there is nothing wrong with this model, because it has become the accepted definition of computing. This must change. In order to make computing more natural and efficient, we will implement the following features: more interconnection (why can I not use my favorite text editor to edit text input fields on a webpage?); orthogonal persistence (things persist only until they are no longer needed); a better user interface. How will these goals be implemented? Through much experience, we have learned the way to more elegant software is a more elegant language behind it. To this end we have chosen to use Python as the language of choice for development.

ForecastWatch.com is in the business of rating the accuracy of weather reports from companies such as Accuweather, MyForecast.com, and The Weather Channel. Over 36,000 weather forecasts are collected every day for over 800 US cities, and later compared with actual climatological data. These comparisons are used by meteorologists to improve their weather forecasts, and to compare their forecasts with others. They are also used by consumers to better understand the probable accuracy of a forecast. ForecastWatch.com was made possible because of the ease of programming complex tasks in Python, and the rapid development that Python allows.

Due to the rapid pace of change in the high tech sector, we often need to evaluate new technologies in order to decide whether to allocate time to learning and using new systems. Jump on the bandwagon too early, and you risk becoming involved with something that just heads downhill or doesn't go anywhere. Wait too long, and you may find yourself behind the times with regards to "the latest thing". With that in mind, let's have a look at some statistics that can be gathered from the Internet regarding programming languages. We examine four sources of information. First, the raw number of results found with Google's search engine. We also look at dollars per click information gleaned from an online advertising service (Overture). In other words, how much it costs you, the advertiser, per click for ads placed with search terms such as "java consulting" or "perl training". In addition, to look at the open source community's take on the situation, we look at projects registered with freshmeat. We also use the Craig's List job search board as a source for very rough job statistics. These sources are by no means exhaustive, and more information would certainly be useful to paint an even clearer picture of programming language usage.

This package can be used to make a Delaunay triangulation of a set of n-dimennsional points. Currently it uses the C libqhull to do the triangulation.

generated on Wed 29 of Sep, 2004 at 01:32:26 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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