Creosote archive for Thu 07 of Oct, 2004

A simple, lightweight system for manipulating HTML (and XML, informally) using a Pythonic object model.

The Python Web Project is an attempt to further ehance Python and promote it as the best language for web programming.

Tom Coates hypothesizes how tag-based bookmarking would work in web browsers. Ultimately this thought experiment shows that browsers shouldn't have bookmarking at all.

quixote tutorials, examples, white paper

osx python script that can be used to convert a pdf to a png, remembering alpha channels and such

asfdasd...

Quixote is yet another framework for developing Web applications in Python; please read the overview of Quixote for an introduction. There is also an introduction and a set of tutorials on the quixote.ca web site

Results to an interesting social experiment

Comparing closure syntax of ruby vs python

"Trying to explain FOAF to these people generally doesn't work, and more often than not, they're too irate to care. So the easiest thing for me to do is just take the site down." Reminds me of the complaints from writers about sites automatically republishing RSS (quick link)

Ultra-liberal feed parser implementation for Python.

Python wrapper for TidyLib.

I'm having few issues with the db (sqlite powered) behind this blog. So it's necessary to migrate it to another DBMS (like PostgreSQL). The problem is that SQLite is a bit too light :) Fortunately, Alinea is using SQLObject to manage its database.

Request for new Python Feature: support for a native (or quasi-native) XML datatype, a la E4X. As recently discussed by Jon Udell and Phil Windley. I wonder how close to the ideal user (developer) experience a solution could get without changes to the core language? Does python 2.3.x have enough innate extensibility to make something decent possible?

Joe Kraus on his new company, Jot. Jot is a wiki, similar to SocialText.  Joe demoed the WYSIWYG editor (which I'm not sure is really a feature over Wiki markup).  You can send an email to a wiki page and have it show up at the bottom (as a message, not as part of the page).  You can add tables to wiki pages for holding structured data, and then query the data.  Joe was a little hand-wavy in talking about how to set up the forms - he typed in a bunch of namespaced XML, but said "you'll be able to do this through our WSIWYG editor soon).  Then he demoed adding web services content to the wiki pages - pulling in RSS feeds, Google search results, reading and writing from SalesForce.com.

A new bugfix release of the baseline RIGs is now available. RIG 2 - XML 1.0 Profile RIG 3 - Namespaces RIG 4 - Schema languages RIG 5 - Internationalisation RIG 6 - Versioning. There is still a whole bunch of work to be done on RIG 4 so there

Little hack to make a bit harder for spammers to parse email address on the web. def cryptEmailAddress(addr): r = [] for l in addr: r.append('&#%d;' % ord(l)) return string.join(r,'') >>>cryptEmailAddress('jkx@larsen-b.com') 'jkx@larse....' And simply put this in a href mailto: and enjoy :) Check the article's pages on this website for a example.

This is a simple subclass to cmd.Cmd standard one to add DBC semantic to the command interpreter class Cmd. It's shamelessly stolen from cmd.Cmd implementation itself - only adapting the return values when needed. To use it, copy this code into a file and subclass DbcCmd to implement your concrete interpreter. """Implement a design by contract behaviour onto cmd module, subclassing it. It allows to add pre and postcondition with the same do_something pattern (you need only to implement pre_something and/or post_something methods) """ import cmd class DbcCmd(cmd.Cmd): def __init__(self): cmd.Cmd.__init__(self) # initialize the base class def precmd(self, line): """Interpret the argument as a precondition, invoking a 'pre_' method inline (if exists). The return value is the command typed itself. """ cmd, arg, line = self.parseline(line) if not line: return line if (cmd is None) or (cmd == ''): return line else: try: func = getattr(self, 'pre_' + cmd) except AttributeError: return line return func(line) def postcmd(self, stop, line): """Interpret the arguments as a postcondition, invoking a 'post_' method inline (if exists). The return value is the stop value. """ cmd, arg, line = self.parseline(line) if not line: return stop if (cmd is None) or (cmd == ''): return stop else: try: func = getattr(self, 'post_' + cmd) except AttributeError: return stop return func(stop, line) To have DBC semantics it's now simply a matter to implement pre_something and post_something methods when needed: these methods must return like the standard cmd.Cmd precmd and postcmd ones, that is line = precond(line) and stop = postcond(stop, line).Enjoy and give feedback, please.

Jason is actually sitting next to me on a red couch right at this moment!

py2app is the bundlebuilder replacement we've all been waiting for. It is implemented as a distutils command, similar to py2exe, that builds Mac OS X applications from Python scripts, extensions, and related data files. It tries very hard to include all dependencies it can find so that your application can be distributed standalone, as Mac OS X applications should be. py2app 0.1.1 is primarily a bugfix release: Several problems related to Mac OS X 10.2 compatibility and standalone building have been resolved Scripts that are not in the same directory as setup.py now work A new recipe has been added that removes the pydoc -> Tkinter dependency A recipe has been added for py2app itself a wxPython example (superdoodle) has been added.

Anybody who has spent any time with me in real life has probably heard me brag about this. In 1978, the National Park Service had the idea to create the first National Historic Reserve, comprised of Ebey's Landing and Ebey's Prairie, on Whidbey Island. This is different from a National Park, in that the land is still being worked, there are still farms and private houses on the property, but the basic character is preserved. The result is Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve (EBLA). The process to create the reserve was long and involved, and in a small ceremony on July 24th, 1988, the reserve was formally established. Why do I care so much about this? My Mother served on the committee that finally got the job done.

Python Grimoire: « The Python Grimoire explains how to perform common programming tasks in Python. It is a good place to go after you've read the Python Tutorial and have a reasonable grasp of the basics of the language. »

I've put together an initial version of a Python module for accessing the Bloglines Web Services. Details and downloads are on the PyBloglines project page. You'll need a copy of Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser, which is used when you get items.Usage is:from pybloglines import BloglinesWebServices# password is optional if you're only calling update() to check unread countbws = BloglinesWebServices("user@example.org", "password")To a count of the unread items for the user:unreadCount = bws.update()To get a list of subscriptions:feeds = bws.listsubs()This is returned as a list of Subscription objects where each entry has title, htmlUrl, type, xmlUrl, bloglinesSubId and bloglinesIgnore.for feed in feeds:    print feed.titleGet the items unread items for a feed, not marking them as read:feedData = bws.getitems(bloglinesSubId)What you get back is the result of passing the RSS returned by the BWS getitems call through feedparser so see the documentation for details on the structure.

For online books on Python, as well as Dive into Python there's A Byte of Python

New Tom Waits album today! Raw, rough, boisterous, beautiful, excellent.

A Python module designed to facilitate rapid application development, primarily of application interfaces, without the loss of underlying toolkit/language functionality.

minixsv is a lightweight XML schema validator written in pure Python. It implements only a subset of the W3C XML schema 1.0 recommendation. minixsv is currently based on standard Python DOM implementation minidom or Fredrik Lundh's elementtree module.

Given a list, find the indices used to get the elements from the list in sorted order.

Pyaddbook is a simple address book which can add, delete, edit, sort and filter entries. It is written in pygtk. GUI designed with glade-2. It uses pysqlite to store the data in a database.

Who are these people who send me mail: ulycufueohvx@proxad.net, dndpfk@anet.net, ltw707oga@chollian.net? XMail offers a mechanism to run message filters during an SMTP session. There are several XMail filters available that invoke SpamAssassin, written in Perl, and one that does SPF, written in Python. It is quite easy add to an SMTP filter to XMail. Here's my Spambayes filter which took just several minutes to write, and I've never seen Spambayes before this. It seems to work, too.

Have you ever found it tedious to mix SQL and other languages, or been reluctant to write the same four lines of code again to do a simple database query? This article can help you eliminate the drudgery involved in database access, and make your programming time more efficient, by wrapping simple transactions in friendly native Python syntax. By making the database emulate regular Python objects, you can remove a source of friction and frustration from your development process. Your time spent programming will be more efficient and productive when you can focus on the task at hand, without being constantly sidetracked by unimportant details like where the cursor object is, or whether you need to escape-protect the data in the next query. Another benefit of using native syntax is better portability. This approach makes it easy for you to change databases without having to rewrite any of your application code. Simply modify a few lines in the database wrapper, and you can support an entirely new database. Though this article focuses on MySQL, the code should work easily with PostgreSQL or even SQLite with only minor modifications.

OSAF has an opening for a hot shot Python hacker to work in the services group. The services group is working on various kinds of infrastructure support for Chandler. One of the big projects in this group is the definition of the content models for the Personal Information Manager. This is an important task because the PIM schemas are a large part of the "API" that makes Chandler data available for use by Chandler modules (called parcels). We'd really like to hire someone with a lot of experience working on Pythonic APIs.

"It is better to have a flexible module that can be used intuitively than an all-singing, all-dancing framework that no-one can be bothered to learn." The Python Web Modules are a suite of simple and easy to use Python components designed to allow developers to write Python CGI scripts or web applications with SQL databases, sessions, templates, email and authorisation functionality without having to install web application servers. A key part of the project is the creation of documentation and examples to allow developers with less time or expierince to understand the concepts of Python web programming without having to read all the sources and comments from the very beginning.

Yesterday I helped Owen with this little Perl script that changes the version header of a SWF file. I decided to write a Python version of the code (of course), with a slightly simplified (command-line) interface.

Alan Kennedy has announced modjy, a WSGI server for Jython 2.1. The power of Jython in a servlet container has to be seen to be believed. It has a way of leaving you in a giggling wreck thinking about how you *used* to do it before you cottened on to Jython.

Jeff Bezos Introduction: Web 1.0 was about making the internet useful for humans - Web 2. 0 is about making the web useful for computers.  Amazon has web services - http://amazon.com/webservices.  Also just announced Alexa web services, with data from Alexa's web crawl (is site slow/fast? adult content? etc.) Sites using Amazon APIs such as musicplasma.com, scoutpal.com (use barcode-enabled scanner to find out how much a used book costs on amazon.com, so you can decide if you should buy it at a store).  Amazon also uses its own web services for internal apps, such as the new a9.com. Now Tim O'Reilly is interviewing Jeff Bezos Tim: Web Services let other people "Rip, Mix, Burn" web content - will site owners feel like the music industry? Jeff: "There's got to be business models for these things".  Don't give away key assets for free, but figure out which assets might be valuable to others (and possibly charge for use). Tim: (after a brief discussion of rich people funding space startups): Are you planning to get up there? Jeff: Definitely. Q (from audience): How did you convince pubs to allow search-inside-the-book? Jeff: Offering samples at point of sale always increases sales - all book stores let you flip through the book.

Laszlo Systems has shifted from selling closed-source software (their Laszlo Presentation Server), to selling services around open-source software (their newly-opened Laszlo Presentation Server). I always wondered how they would manage to compete with Macromedia's Flex platform, which occupied a very similar niche (rich web-based applications). (more..)

generated on Thu 07 of Oct, 2004 at 01:32:09 PM in Melbourne, Australia

this page is generated once a day.