Creosote archive for Mon 08 of Aug, 2005

more geek information

an intensive course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers

Guido has posted his powerpoint slides in the usual location. (Opens fine in OpenOffice.) The slides are mostly the same as the ones from EuroPython a month ago; here are the main differences: Some odd slides during the introduction (anyone who was there care to explain these?) language data scraped from sf.net -- or you could just look at this page; no need to scrape and piss off SF for something this simple. (Poor Dylan -- even less projects than Cobol -- 2 vs 4.) "What does this buy us" slides added to 342 (generator) and 343 (with) PEP discussion (highly recommended if you haven't been following python-dev religiously) Exception reform discussion Personally, the "with" statement excites me the most.

Having a technology called "Ajax" was bad enough... but who calls a programming language "Kont"? (Again, probably only funny if you're Dutch...) ... [22 words]

One of the most interesting characteristics of the Web is that it doesn’t version. The Web is a bona-fide computing ecosystem, and is along with email, one of the killer applications of another system, the Internet, itself designed for high-survivability and to deal with massive physical infrastructure damage (it’s literally nuke-proof). The Web evolves as does the Internet it runs on.

I searched at length for a good treatment of this subject, and for the most part had to puzzle through it for myself. Now, as fodder for Google, here's how to configure a PIX firewall without having to use network address translation. The Cisco PIX is pre-disposed to wanting you to use NAT for the 'inside' (secure) portion of your network. Some of this probably comes from the fact that the PIX was initially a NAT-only device, which has evolved into a firewall since coming to Cisco. However, there are many reasons you would not want this, including sharing the broadcast segment with non-NAT hosts (not that I recommend this) and for general ease of configuration of some protocols that are generally broken by NAT.

Wow, I went to create a new folder for a new month, and the last one was 05, with just one entry in it. Anyway, a quick one: Here's a Vim syntax hilighting file for use editing files that use Dreamweaver templates. It just puts template areas in grey, just like Dreamweaver does, and it uses the PHP + HTML formatting mode for the editable regions. You can ":source" the file after opening your target file, or you can add your own autoloads such as: :au BufNewFile,BufRead *.php so <sfile>:h/dwt.vim

Yesterday, I wanted to automatically compute an attribute from another for indexing purposes. The model API documentation revealed a useful _pre_save hook for exactly this purpose. My first crack at the code looked something like this simplified sitename/apps/appname/models/appname.py: from django.core import meta import md5 class Destination(meta.Model): fields = ( meta.CharField('url', unique=True, index=True, maxlength=1024), meta.CharField('urlhash', unique=True, index=True, maxlength=32), ) def _pre_save(self): self.urlhash = md5.md5(self.url).digest().encode('hex') That looked fine, but when I tried to save a Destination it bombed out: C:\dev\pytagger-svn>python Python 2.3.5 (#62, Feb 8 2005, 16:23:02) Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from django.models.appname import destinations >>> d = destinations.Destination(url='http://www.djangoproject.com/') >>> d.save() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? ... File "sitename\apps\appname\models\appname.py", line 25, in _pre_save self.urlhash = md5.md5(self.url).digest().encode('hex') NameError: global name 'md5' is not defined What went wrong is that whilst md5 is in the global namespace of the sitename.apps.appname.models.appname module, it isn't automatically copied to the global namespace of the virtual destinations module imported from the django.models.appname package.

Have just finished reading through the tutorial. Unfortunately, after finding the solution to the admin interface not showing up (you have to specify the "admin" settings file, despite the tutorial's assertion that the two settings files are the same...

As I covered in my talk this past PyCon, we're getting a proliferation of domain-modelling frameworks in Python. I'm actually responsible for 2 of them myself (OpenGLContext's fields and BasicProperty). There's also Traits, Zope's fields, and a simil...

Whilst listening to Rob Curley's mind-blowing presentation about the Lawrence Journal-World Online, which I previously blogged about as the best online newspaper in the world, I was slack-jawed with wonder at how a small team could pull off such a massively detailed data-driven web site. The answer is Django - The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines, a Python based web framework the Lawrence Journal-World team have now spun off as an open source project. And, it turns out that my fellow Pythonista Simon Willison has been well involved. I've never played with Ruby on Rails, so can't draw a direct comparison, but web development using Django goes like a scalded cat.

While the Flash 8 runtime is still in public beta, quite a bit about its new features have already been discovered by reverse engineering. One "feature" I haven't heard much about is the new "security" model. It's ridiculously broken and stupid (not that this should be a surprise). Specifically, movies running on the local machine are not allowed to do any network communication whatsoever (even to localhost) without popping up a really obnoxious warning to the user! No other application or content development environments I've seen have any such brainless restrictions. Not HTML, not QuickTime, not anything else.

You give eternally So you are loved Made an icon To sell cola Children cry your name With lists of toys attached They ignore your power Darker stories from the past Of powerful magics Serving implacable justice They would rather not know The force be...

Decided I needed to play with Django so that I can at least know what it is.

I saw from another blogger's feed Katie a place to order the classic python stuff: http://www.cafepress.com/bokunenjin. Ok, its a generic tee. But better than nothing right? It reminds me of this blast from the past which reads from the back: class PythonWorkShop: def __init__(self): self.attendees = [] self.losers = [] def addAttendee(self, person): self.attendees.append(person) def addLoser(self, person): self.losers.append(person) TheThird = PythonWorkShop() TheThird.version = 3.0 TheThird.day = range(4, 7) TheThird.month = 12 TheThird.year = 1995 TheThird.place = "USGS, Reston, Virginia" TheThird.addAttendee("Me") TheThird.addLoser("You") Of course, this shirt is from ten years ago.

generated on Mon 08 of Aug, 2005 at 01:32:08 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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