Creosote archive for Thu 24 of Mar, 2005

An asynchronous framework for Python

Interview with Guido van Rossum, Dave Thomas, and other bright lights.

PyCon2005のレポートブログ、IronPythonに関して

A GreaseMonkey script to enable Textile processing in textareas

applescriptとpythonのブリッジなのかな？

SchoolTool - SchoolBell Calendar Server looks like it might be ready to depoly as the important missing link for calendars.It comes from the SchoolTool project that I have mentioned before: 42: The Shuttleworth Foundation | Supporting Social Innovation. It is of course also written in Python. I have also mentioned Sunbird in 42: The Sunbird Project - Standalone Calendar and the key missing part was a Server which SchoolBell provides. I am going to try this on my new server once it is running. Link found from: Python Packages Index: schoolbell 1.0rc1.

Thanks to Simon I hope to be at the Small Values of Cool: London Python meetup tomorrow. I have even joined Meetup.com and signed up for the London Python meetup. According to the event page there should be at least nine there.

Following on from 42: Targetted feeds it is done.In addition to the main feed for the site (RSS and Atom) there are now separate feeds for each Category. So if you are only interested in what I have to say about Cycling you can subscribe to that feed only. The categories are listed below the (XML) links are the Cateogory RSS feeds: Cycling (XML) Java (XML) Life (XML) OperatingSystems (XML) Python (XML) Religion (XML) Weblogs (XML) Web/Tech (XML) I will be submitting the category feeds to appropriate aggregators (eg Planet Python). It will be interesting to see what this does to traffic.

This is good Jython has a Wiki. Includes a RSS feed of changes. I hope Bill is right in his hope that this will show things moving forward.

Ian has been Warnocked! See A WSGI reference library for his proposals for a library of tools for WSGI. My thoughts were first to enjoy someone else beinmg Warnocked <evil grin>. More sensibly, it looks a good idea to me. BUT it needs to keep tiny dependencies and be really flexible.

I have written about py.test before but Agile Testing: Python unit testing part 3: the py.test tool and library is much a better and more detailed review.

If you have development projects that use Subversion for source code control then Trac from The Trac Project looks very interesting, I found this through CherryPy a python web framework used by Trac. I was following up some links about WSGI which it seems the next version of CherryPy will support.

I keep coming back to Plone for Content Management eg 42: McBlog: Open Source CMS - Scary world and 42: WSGI Utils so here are some recent Plone goodies...A new book:  plone.org - "Building Websites with Plone" book available. My copy has been shipped direct from the publisher Link: Packt Book Store :: Building Websites with Plone (actually shipped in nthe UK with free postage). Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon: Plone is to Zope as XML is to SGML. is a very positive view.

I have an idea (oh no not another) that draws on a number of different things that seem to be coming together to offer hope of a new architecture for developing and deploying web applications. One that offers a richer experience for the user coupled with more flexibility and resiliance for developers and administrators...yes it's a magic bullet ;-) No, more seriously. I have been thinking about how the following connect: REST based servers XMLHttpRequest based web browser UI's see 42: Auto complete comes of age - SitePoint DHTML & CSS Blog and 42: Joel on Software - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 and 42: Rest Fest. Tim Bray's comments on threading for multi-core servers ongoing: Software in the TLP Era. Jon Udell's comments on tiny http servers eg The present and future value of Python and  XML.com: Lightweight XML Search Servers. The problems the SpreadFirefox website had with bandwidth which required all images to be handled by a sub-domain.

Well I guess Ian announcing his My New Blog is good news given the amount of sensible things he says and given the great code he produces. But was YABS (Yet Another Blogging Server) really needed ;-)

I have just written my first wsgi application. I used WSGI Utils andI have to say it was rather easy, at least to get started. I would like to look at moving the session support (which is dead easy to use) to be wsgi middleware and then make it compatible with the stuff Ian Bicking (wsgiKit) has been working on.

I wrote about Annotatable Python docs. a while ago. Now along comes WikalongExtension - Wikalong Firefox Extension which is a cool extention for Firefiox to allow any web page to be annotated.

I read The Cost Of Database Independence and was not impressedYes I agree that the way this particular company were allocating ID's was not very good from a performance point of view. But the article then makes two huge and untenable leaps. Firstly, that there is not a better way to do this and keep the same level of database independance (ie use no database specific techniques such as sequences). This is just not true.

Some really good news for anyone interested in WSGI is in Diary for titus: WSGI, Quixote, SCGI, QWIP, and SWAP.Thanks to Titus Brown we now have 2 great new options. First a new WSGI server using SCGI from the Quixote project and SWAP, the "SCGI-WSGI application p(something)". That may be the best performing WSGI server to date as it uses mod_scgi to talk to apache. Second a new WSGI framework using  QWIP, the "Quixote-WSGI interface p(something)" we should now be able to run any quixote application on any wsgi server. I have not yet tested any of this but it is very exciting news. Many thanks Titus.

Onion Networks AntFlow™: Hotfolder Driven Workflow and Automation is interesting butas Steve: Developing on the Edge: AntFlow: Workflow in Ant questions, is Ant the right basis for this type of tool? Personally I would much rather look towards using queues as the basis for a workflow. That could use the Amazon.com Simple Queue Service following the Starbuck model (see Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit - Enterprise Integration Patterns). So when you drop files into a directory a simple process adds them to a queue.

I don't think it is surprising that there is Lots Of Interest in Lucene Desktop it could be very useful. It does seem to me that a good separation of client and server will make it more so. Then lots of exciting things become even easier.

This is the future for Identity and web applications (others too) Lasso - Souk is a Python implementation of the Liberty Alliance protocols built on top of Lasso which is a library that can be called from a variety of languages including Java and PHP. Liberty is a great idea and free tools like Lasso will make it much more widely used by web applications from smaller companies. It is something Sun have pushed a lot. Found via PyPi

I believe that a clear division is being formed betweenprojects that are moving forward with clear regular releases and a tight focus (best example I can think of is Ubuntu) and those that are rambling on and may one day release but in the meantime lots of new stuff is being added far too many good examples Debian comes instantly to mind (although maybe some progress is being made see LWN subscriber only until 24th original email on gmane). I suppose it should be obvious but this is such an easy mistake to make (and I know I have done it). Get into a machine like release crank out mode and projects just go better, it is a positive spiral, start letting releases slip and you end up wasting so much time maintaining multiple versions that progress seems to disappear. The big vision is needed but far better is the ability to crank out incremental innovation on a regular and predictable release cycle, you can get to the same point so much faster. The bigger the project the more important this is.

Thanks to the combination of Small Values of Cool: Python meetup at The Stage Door, Waterloo on the 13th of April and Meetup.com Python › The London Python Meetup Group › Event: London Python Meetup. I have a new date in my diary. Put down as a maybe given the definate failed last time.

notes during pycon (going on now)

pyCon2005 IPythonはCPythonの1.5倍くらい高速　カンファレンスの模様を柴田さんが

The first day of Pycon 2005 is wrapping up, and we're heading to dinner soon. Attending the sprints was a good way to get ramped up before the talks; I think if I hadn't been breathing Python 24/7 for a...

a list of pycon 2005 papers

Stateful programmatic web browsing in Python, after Andy Lester's Perl module WWW::Mechanize .

I decided to learn a lot more about mod_rewrite last night and I implemented a few rules that will surprise folks who source images from my site. If you want to source images from my site, ask me first. My email address is on my site. There are various other ways to contact me that aren't hard to figure out. I hadn't up until this point set the policy in stone, but now I have and that's the way it is.

The PyCon Blog looks like another good place to keep tabs on what is going on here at PyCon. Another excellent resource is the collected SubEthaEdit notes for various sessions as gathered by Ted Leung. Also worth keeping an eye on are the searches and tages that I mentioned in my Tracking PyCon post.

[image: "spiral"] PIL 1.1.5c2 is 1.1.5c1 plus a couple of build tweaks, and an experimental PERSPECTIVE transform. Available as source, and as Windows binaries for 2.1 and later. Enjoy!

Completely useless, but everybody's doing it... The Singleton design pattern is the one which strikes me the most. Not in the ahAH kind of way, rather in the WTF? 15 lines of code to implement a global variable? kind of way.

Several groups ranted about how much they loved SQLObject while they were recapping what got done at the sprints before the conference. SQLObject allows you to map a database table to a Python object so that you can interact with it in a simple table.field (or object.property) way. It aparently increased the productivity of several of the sprinting teams.

After lunch I caught a great session on matplotlib which is a Python library that allows you to plot 2d graphcs in a simple Matlab-like way. The library takes advantage of several graphical frontends, including GTK, Tk, wxWindows, and FLTK. Rumor has it that someone is 90% done with a native Cocoa frontend too. Take a look at the screenshots for examples of what it can do.

Before lunch I sat in on a session on using Python to interface with Applescript. Appscript is used to create a bridge between Python code and Applescript. Here&#8217;s a quick code snippet to give you an idea what Appscript can do: from appscript import * f = app.("Finder.app") f.help # shows what you can do with it, very nice. f.desktop.disk[1].free_space.get() # gives you an insane number of bytes free Slick indeed.

Sprint leaders reported on what got done during the four days of sprinting. We heard reports from the Chandler, Zope/ZODB, Schooltool, Distutils, Core, and PyPy sprints, and then I asked the audience a bunch of questions. Recording the answers for...

Lots of the usual suspects are back from last year, so there is a decent sized effort to provide you with notes of the PyCon 2005 sessions. PyCon is much larger next year, so one of the auditoriums has not wireless, which may hamper getting transcripts of some of the larger talks.

For my current project, I have integrated a few different open source Python projects that give me power at least equivalent to that of Rails. The pre-packaged integration is only one part of it, though: the Rails guys are good at marketing their ideas. Not only are they good at marketing to Ruby audiences, but they also have done a great job of getting Java folks to write about it.

The two groups have finished their parcels to the level where we can show them as part of our presentation on Thursday. I think this is great - It helps a bit with the presentation nerves as well. Other happenings at the sprints: PJE and Bob Ippolito have been hard at work on PythonEggs.

&#187; Java on Pocket PC, the Unofficial FAQ &#187; Java Support On Pocket PC Also, &#187; Languages for the Java VM

Jim Hugunin's keynote covered much of the same territory as his IronPython talk last year: an introduction to the CLR and .NET, IronPython's architecture, and demos of accessing C# classes from Python. He was apologetic about disappearing for the past...

Steve Holden gave an introduction to the conference. In case I end up giving a similar talk next year, here's the outline for my reference: General intro Auditorium rules and layout of conference Thanks to sponsors Two slides on how...

I was doing some general purpose googling on worker productivity when I came accross a study that says that: Chilly workers not only make more errors but cooler temperatures could increase a worker&#8217;s hourly labor cost by 10 percent, estimates Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell&#8217;s Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory. Cool. So now we can all tell our employers to stop penny pinching and turn up the heat! When the office temperature in a monthlong study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent. Hedge&#8217;s study was exploring the link between changes in the physical environment and work performance. &#8220;The results of our study also suggest raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker, per hour,&#8221; said Hedge, who presented his findings this summer at the Eastern Ergonomics Conference and Exposition in New York City. Turn up the heat and save money.

Paper: accepted My paper on FRII: accepted. Hooray! Open Source Science Via slashdot, Climatology debate goes open-source. Some climate change challengers made their code available, essentially challenging their opponents to do the same.

I&#8217;ve tried to gather a list of resources that will allow people who are not attending PyCon to keep track of the various things that are going on. There are also RSS feeds associated with many of the resources below: Schedule PyCon DC 2005 Wiki Technorati Search: pycon. Tag: pycon.

I&#8217;m gathering up various bits and pieces of gear before heading out the door and taking the Metro down to PyCon. The schedule is impressive, and that&#8217;s not even counting a lot of the ad-hoc goodness that will be going on in the open spaces. I plan on blogging as much as possible and will keep link to my posts throughout the day from this meta-post. The official backchannel is #PyCon on irc.freenode.net, and I&#8217;ll be there. Day 1 posts: Tracking PyCon 2005 Keynote: IronPython Scripting the Mac with Python Matplotlib: From Brain Surgery to Rocket Science SQLObject More PyCon Coverage PyObjC Slides

A bit thank you to RichardP (sorry, no link - no browser with cut and paste available right now as I'm sitting on the floor in my lounge and using a Linux box with no GUI), who has recently added the Topic Exchange's wiki to the list of sites that his WikiMinion anti-spam bot cleans. This is incredibly helpful for me, because I wasn't monitoring the Topic Exchange wiki well enough, and many pages have been lost after a spammer replaced them with a bunch of links and their old versions expired. This shouldn't happen any more. Once again, thank you RichardP! Comment

BeautifulSoup is a great Python module that lets you parse HTML and XML documents very easily. Via BangPypers meeting note.

Gordon Luk says about resource locking on the internet (you know "transactions" and all that stuff): "...that people trying to work around this problem with complex WS algorithms are certainly expending a lot of time and effort chasing an impractical goal

I got to the convention center today around 2, after walking about 4 miles in the wrong direction from my hotel. While I was on the plane, the Twisted/Divmod folks released Twisted 2.0 and Nevow 0.4, which is very cool, of course. I'll probably use Nevow 0.4 in Minnow (which I'll put up for download soon, I promise). I spent some time rounding out the XML-RPC APIs for Minnow (a rant on the state of those APIs later), and hacking together a couple quick CRUD screens for web-based weblog administration. Anyways, it was great meeting/seeing everyone - what a great community! All the sprint rooms are packed with all sorts of different people, old and young, hacking together, Quite a sight to behold- I don't think any other language has such a vibrant and active community..

and . Hooray, Python.

I was fiddling at work with a velcro cable tie, and I ended up making a snail: (more..)

Since work duties and recent surgery have kept Tim Lesher from PyCon, he'd be grateful for a digital snapshot of anyone in the crowd wearing a "Choose Python" or "PySpotting" shirt.

Base-Art reckons one of Cheetah's strengths is the way it applies the object-oriented model to documents. He shows how to overload parts of a template.

Simon Brunning had said he'd be happy to see the back of lambda, but then saw a "beautiful" use for them when Fredrik Lundh posted ElementPlist. "He only does it to make me look stupid, you know."

Swaroop C H is excited that OSoft, Inc. has released his book 'A Byte of Python' in the XHTML-based Thout format, because of the "very cool" functionality provided by the Thout reader software. The official Python documentation and 'Dive Into Python' are also available in Thout format at the OSoft website.

Richard Jones had another (mostly) good day of sprinting.

While skimming the PyCon 2005 presentations, Phillip Eby was interested to see a few ideas that he thought could also be implemented using simple generic functions. "The cool thing about finding this out now," he says, "is that I can now use those other systems as a basis for comparison in my presentation, which may lead to more interesting discussions."

Phillip Eby and Bob Ippolito hacked out a lot of the Python Eggs implementation on Monday. As Phillip explains, "An egg is to a Python as a jar is to Java."

Fredrik Lundh shows how to use ElementTree to load plist files, the XML format used by iTunes to store playlists.

Jim Hughes has been tinkering with del.icio.us again. Using a lightly modified version of pydelicious, he can now create a daily post of his previous day's del.icio.us items.

java.net mentions the Jython project's new wiki. John Reynolds has written in: "Efforts are underway to close the gap between CPython and Jython, and to port Jython to JDK 5. The new Jython Wiki is documenting the progress."

generated on Thu 24 of Mar, 2005 at 01:32:15 PM in Melbourne, Australia

this page is generated once a day.