Creosote archive for Thu 30 of Dec, 2004

Making a Python GUI Client App

In response to Han's Nowak's question of what new language to use, and since Python had to be excluded, may I suggest JScript.NET? Reasons: Dynamic - so much that I'm contemplating porting one of our large Python services to it by just adding braces (yes it is that close to Python) Optional static typing - using annotation that turns out to be identical to Guido's ideas Runs on the Common Language Runtime, and therefore has access to all the GUI libraries Talks to databases - see previous point High level of productivity - if you are coding up Javascript on the browser, there is a lot less loss of productivitity, rather than switching between multiple languages while writing the server code and the client code Reasonable user base - since its lineage comes from Javascript (which is more popular than BitTorrent - wink)

A friend has put together a page describing a number of organizations helping relief efforts in Sri Lanka. Give it a look, and donate something.

In addition to this python blog I also maintain some art sites. Aboriginal Dot Paintings Aboriginal Paintings Blog (with Japanese translation) And now, resuming with the normal programming...

ha!

my talk from the London Perl Workshop 2004

More wxStyledTextControl examples

PyObjC v1.2 is now available. You can grab it from the sourceforge download page or from my idisk. The major changes are listed below. There is some seriously cool stuff in here; new packaging, support for pure-python loadable NSBundles, categories, better bridging of complex types, and revamped examples. PyObjCTools.AppHelper.stopEventLoop will attempt to stop the current NSRunLoop (if started by runConsoleEventLoop) or terminate the current NSApplication (which may or may not have been started by runEventLoop). This version no longer support Python 2.2.

Invented Python

Fairly specific example but at least something that shows use of the wxStyledTextControl API

"SilverCity is a lexing package, based on Scintilla, that can provide lexical analysis for over 20 programming and markup langauges." Very nice API once you trawl the source.

python object database

Twisted is a networking framework for python.

Official Python Site

I have been a long time what a "tsunami" is. After recent news, I guess everybody know what this evil is about. Do you think Cisco will still use "tsunami" as default for ESSID for their wireless products ? I haven't a aironet card on my desk right now, but believe me, the default ESSID for access point, and wireless card made by Cisco is: tsunami. Beside, this sound a pretty good name for a wireless product, I really believe it's the worst to choose now. If someone as a aironet card, perhaps he can post the default iwconfig result here.

A build of ReSTedit 0.50 is available on my .mac file download page. It should "just work" on any Mac OS X 10.3 system as it includes both the pyobjc and docutils libraries within the app wrapper. Beyond a handful of bug fixes, ReSTedit includes new features described in this post. The README and ToDo list have also been updated. Comment

(quick link)

My sister received a new powerbook for Christmas and I'm in the process of moving her world from an old iMac to the new powerbook. I chose not to use the automatic migration tool because there are several years of garbage strewn across the old system's hard drive. Somehow, my sister managed to duplicate a huge number of the thousands of digital photos in her iPhoto library. Some are duped many times and there were a number of copies of the photo library from various efforts to back it up.

While helping me to diagnose some lingering DNS problems with my host switch, Pitkin pointed me to dnsstuff.com, a nifty tool portal with plenty of handy DNS doodads.

For those of you that don't read Planet Apache, Sanjiva Weerawarana is an Apache Software Foundation member who lives in Sri Lanka. He an his family survived the tsunami, and now he is trying to get involved with the relief efforts in Sri Lanka. Here's his report of his first day. (in his reports LSF stands for the Lanka Software Foundation, an open source foundation that Sanjiva helped to start) If you want to help tsunamihelp.blogspot.com (among others) is aggregating relief info.

Just to keep everyone current who's playing along at home: I recently became chair of the Narragansett AMC Young Members, which until we get some more leaders to post is practically my other weblog. Also, my application with the Boston AMC Young Members to become a 3-season dayhike leader was approved. And I'm now a co-webmaster of the Boston AMC Young Members site. Busy, busy.

Some DIY templates for the Getting things done method.

A scientific animation of the waves spreading over the Bay of Bengal. (via gapingvoid)

PyCon 2005, the third annual Python developers' conference, will be held at George Washington University's Cafritz Conference Center in Washington DC on March 23-25, 2005. The keynote speaker will be Jim Hugunin, author of IronPython. IronPython is a new implementation of the Python programming language for the Microsoft .NET and open-source Mono platforms. PyCon is a community-oriented conference targeting developers interested in Python. The conference program will include peer-reviewed presentations, impromptu talks, and meetings for planning future development. Early bird conference registration costs $175 US ($125 for students) through January 28. Regular per-registration after that date will cost $250 ($175 for students), and $300 ($225 for students) at the conference.

Sockets are the lead pipes of computer networks: they let you connect with other devices so that information can flow freely. As you might expect, they're widely used on the Internet. Peyton McCullough explains how to code sockets in Python.

I've just posted a draft PyCon proposal to the PEAK Wiki; I'd be interested in feedback from anyone interested in the subject. Are there any topics missing from the outline that you'd like to see? Conversely, am I belaboring the obvious in it? The deadline for the proposal is Friday, but I'm probably going to send it in Thursday evening at the latest, so comment soon if you think I should change the proposal. (Not that I can't still make changes to the plan later, if I get comments later.) Thanks!

I've been creating a lot of reports at my new job, using ReportLab and pyntkit. It's been great to a) be so productive, and b) use so much Python. It seems like there's a lot of potential task 'sweet spots' here that could use some sort of content management / workflow tool. This all coincides very well with a recent Slashdot review on two new Plone books, which led me to the online Plone Book. I've gone back and forth with Zope, and have usually thrown up my hands in frustration. With Plone, the sheer number of bells and whistles gets kind of confusing if all you want to do is make a simple application. Plone also requires you to pretty much give your site over to it. The worst part about the bells and whistles was the terrible documentation. I'm a relatively bright guy, I enjoy new things, but the learning curve on Plone / Zope was atrocious, largely because there just weren't any good books on the market that could explain the system to me in a way that made sense to me. And yet, despite my frustration, Zope and Plone have continued to grow. The Plone sites page is tremendously impressive. So, after checking out this new Plone book, I'm starting to believe that I can actually make some useful stuff for work with Plone. We'll see.

If you are familiar with Mike Clark's JUnitPerf framework, then you may be interested in knowing that I have just released a Python port: pyUnitPerf.

Over vacation, I have recreationally hacked upon ReSTedit. In particular, I wanted to add two features that have been on the todo list since the project's inception. First, the toolbar has always had a segmented control that indicates whether both the source and rendered views were visible or which one was visible in the case where the vertical split view was fully expanded or collapsed. It was totally useless. The original intention was to allow the user to click on one of the segments to pop the split view to a particular position, as appropriate. Now, the reason why I wanted the above feature was for the second feature. Long ago, I added Uli's UKKQueue class to the project. The intention was to monitor any opened files and automatically re-render the ReStructured Text whenever a file is changed on disk. I never got around to implementing the feature because I assumed it would be more challenging than it appeared and I didn't have the time to go off and figure out what the hell was going on if something break. That particular assumption proved to be very accurate.

Following up on the release of VR Juggler 2.0 Beta 1, I am pleased to announce the release of PyJuggler 1.0 Beta 1. This release includes many important additions over the last release in July 2004: complete code coverage for user-visible application programming interfaces; addition of bindings for vrj::GlContextData to allow for user-defined application-specific data in Python application objects; addition of bindings for cluster::UserData to allow for user-defined shared data types in cluster configurations; addition of docstrings for all classes and nearly all methods and functions; support for Mac OS X (without PyJuggler.vrj.OsgApp, however); support for pickling of types commonly used with application-specific shared data in cluster configurations; addition of bindings for Sonix in the new module PyJuggler.snx. VR Juggler provides a platform for virtual-reality application development. PyJuggler is a Python module that allows VR Juggler application objects to be written in Python.

After thinking through the fact base design a bit more, I think I have a clearer picture: a fact base is a mapping from fact types to fact sets, that supports rules that are invoked in response to change events. I'm not positive that my current idea about how to propagate events is right. What I do know is that derivation rules need to be independent of the actual fact set implementations. The fundamental problem is the direction of change event propagation. We don't know (at the fact type/schema definition level) what direction the fact sets implement changes in. If derivation rules are inherently bidirectional, this means that any event leaving a given fact type will (in a naive system) return back to the point of origin, resulting in an infinite loop. I think this is going to need some more thought. The architecture is starting to sound a bit more like an event-driven system with dynamic routing, and less like a system that's statically routable by generic function(s). Anyway, I think the fact base system is definitely going to need some sort of API to explicitly deal with derivation and listening. This is all a little more complex than what I originally envisioned, as I was thinking that a derivation API would emerge somewhat later in the design/development process. But, my previous vision didn't address all the composability and scalability issues, so that's understandable.

This coming Friday, December 31st, is the deadline for proposals for PyCon 2005. If you've been procrastinating about getting your proposal outline done, time is running short.

From comments... "How is the argument from reliability of Lisp and Erlang systems an argument against optional static type declarations?" The real question is, should optional type annotations be added to Python? I'd say no, the return on investment is not nearly as great as investing in several other implementation features. Optional type annotations were added to Common Lisp in the early 1980s. Compiler strategies have improved a lot since then, as have machine capabilities. I think a better return would come from investing in the implementation of the current Python language rather than changing the Python language itself. I think the downside of having every Python programmer have to understand the best practices of optional type annotations would be far worse than the upside of having them. To repeat myself, the investment should be made 'under the hood' of the current Python language.

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