Creosote archive for Tue 16 of Aug, 2005

python idioms

Joguinho viciante da mulesta...

It didn’t take long to hear back from eight people in southeast lower Michigan (with a disproportionate percentage in Ann Arbor), so I have gone ahead and started the Michigan Python Users Group (michipug) mailing list. People have different agendas for their user groups. Jim Holmes appeared to be seeking World Domination with his .NET user group in Dayton, Ohio. I’m going to toss out an opening volley in what I’d like to see in a user group: Semi-regular, face-to-face, semi-structured meetings to meet up with smart people and exchange useful and practical info about software development in Python. Exchange of useful local information on the mailing list (relevant job postings, events, etc). Occasional sprints, for people interested in writing some code togetherAn organized group that can harrass Python dignitaries that happen to come to Michigan into sharing a slice of their knowledge.

Flash Remoting is a way for Flash movies running in a web browser to request structured data from the web server.

PyX is a Python package for the creation of PostScript and PDF files.

a place to advocate, discuss, and practice the art of using less code to get more done

Generate Excel files from Python. Requires 2.4 (for decorator support)

Because the world is round...

Python para o Palm

Here's a few nice Python quickies, I know I could have used del.icio.us to tag them and dump them here, but I wanted to add some more comments than del.icio.us really allows, so they're here instead. First off, the invaluable Python Grimoire a vital resource for someone like me, someone who writes Python too infrequently and sporadically and hence forgets some of the syntax and the best Pythonic ways to do routine tasks. Rui's been maintaining it for a while, but he's now relaunched it in TiddlyWiki format, this is a great way to read and browse the grimoire, I love it! Also a couple of nice things from Matt's PyS60 wiki page, the Series60 tagged items from Code Snippets and Simon Judge's Python freeware, three handy little PyS60 apps - where's the source Simon? :-) I've really got to sit down and tinker with PyS60 again, roll on the 26 hour day and the 9 day week...

Grams was bragging all morning yesterday (again) about how she was going to win the pool tournament. She actually managed to get 2 games ahead at one point, but I rallied back and swept the last 3 games to prove once again that; while you often can o...

Naja is a download manager and a website grabber written in Python/wxPython.You can add some plugins (newsreader, newsgroups grabber, FTP -FTPS - SFTP client,WebDAV client) and take control of your downloads from your office. Naja supports proxy (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP,SOCKS v4a, SOCKSv5), and use some authentication methods.The downloading maybe achieved by splitting the file being downloaded into several parts and downloadingthese parts at the same time (HTTP,HTTPS,FTP).Donwload speeds are increased by downloading the file from the mirrors sites,when the sites propose it. Others features:     Csv filter     Cheksums (CRC32, MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA, SHA1, MDC2, RMD160)     Crypt (Only for the eXtended version) and Decrypt (AES, DES, 3DES ...)     Newsreader, Newsposter (uue, yEnc)     CGI & WebDAV     Server Web Interface basic and digest authentication for client and server     Compress and decompress (zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2)     Picture viewer     Text Editor...

org.keyphrene is a Python binding for LibSSH2 and OpenSSL libraries. This toolkit for python featuring the following:  SSH2 protocol (SFTP, SCP, SSH terminal ...)  HMACs, message digests, ciphers (AES, DES, BlowFish),  RSA, DSA, DH,SSL functionality  yEnc encoder and decoder ......

Doc Searls has the lead article in the September Linux Journal on "Identity". This is yet another topic I have barely understood. My interest is growing though with the concept of "user centric identity". The title of Searl's article is "Independent Identity" which points out an irony of sorts that's been on my mind.

1. start Acrobat Reader 7.0 2. click Help, followed by About Acrobat Reader 7 3.

I was helping a friend navigate the Xlibris web site: we were trying to find guidelines for formatting a poetry manuscript. After doing it the hard way (following links) for a while, I figured I would try their search for "poetry". I was flabbergasted to see these results returned: (more..)

Today i wondered why i get so much spam. Well it's simple, load you google, hit the query with my mail address (the one at free.fr), and you'll get about 300 results. Most of those results are Debian related, i used to maintain a Debian package. So, sp4mmers, if you want to sell more vi4gra or whatever, have a look at this one for instance. I don't understand, there are thousands of Debian developers out there, and nobody tried to solve the problem of email address collecting ?

I'm back from vacation and from the XML Summer School in Oxford. The Summer School was fun. A unique event.

Philip Eby has some comments on the Chandler development team recent decision to drop its XML-based "parcel" (parcels are components in Chandler) description format in favor of a pure-Python solution. There are two interesting lessons in his post: Of course, the real sin here was not so much XML per se, as overengineering in advance of requirements. If you're not developing the feature now, it's best not to make a bunch of other design decisions based on what you think the feature will need. A little thing like choosing to put data in XML form can result in a wide variety of additional costs like: Designing the XML format Implementing a parser Documenting the format Developing a bunch of stuff in the format Evolving and fixing the parser to handle more and more complex use cases that weren't thought of previously Productivity losses versus what it would've been with Python Converting all the data once you decide it was a bad idea, or else paying the ongoing marketing and education costs to get third-party developers over the hump, or the cost of not getting those developers on board And: I've certainly worked for organizations where the reverse is true, though, including one that threw away tens of millions of dollars trying to replace a small, well-designed Python application with an expensive piece of "enterprise" crapware.

It seems that most of my gripes about MySQL boil down to three things: It sucks if your recent previous experience is with more capable SQL databases. I actually learned SQL using MySQL back in 1997 or whatever, but it was using hardcopy literature written for the ANSI standard... so I'd write SQL with views, subselects, and whatnot, and curse MySQL for not having the features I thought I wanted.

(Seen in a slashdot comment.) Possible mottos for the PHP project: PHP: We'll be there for you if your development environment doesn't have enough side effects. PHP: Because we know the money's in the maintenance contracts. PHP: Because you obviously don't know any better. PHP: We take security as seriously as Microsoft ten years ago. PHP: Doing it fast is always better than doing it right. PHP: Proving that if any idiot can write an e-commerce package, any idiot will. PHP: Yet another great reason to make regular backups. PHP: Fast, cheap, and robust. Two out of three ain't bad, right?

After way too long I made a real release of FormEncode. Hopefully I didn't forget anything; but if I did I'll just make another release, not that big a deal. SQLObject is going to depend on FormEncode, because sqlobject.includes.validators was always just an expedient fork of FormEncode.

"15 Aug 2005: Cheetah templates are easy to understand and maintain. This article shows you how to generate any kind of text-based content quickly. One aspect of Cheetah's philosophy: "Python for the back end, Cheetah for the front end." Follow this rule of thumb, and you should have no trouble reaping the benefits of this templating system."

"2.4.2 in September, first alpha of 2.5 around March next year."

"A few days back I listened to this IMA Keynote by Rob Curley on IT Conversations . It blew my mind. I started out looking for some insight in to the team behind Django , The Lawrence Journal-World , lawrence.com , and so on. I got a whole lot more than I had bargained for. If you re involved in old media, new media, any media, or just want a glimpse of the future (I hope), please have a listen. It will be very interesting to see what happens in the next few months as Django takes flight, Rob heads to Naples (with technical backup from Eric ) and Adrian telecommutes to The Washington Post"

"... ... NewsFeed is an RSS/RDF/Atom reader and aggregator that... features minimal dependencies (it uses Python/Tk), a live search function, and audio notification when new items are available. ... ... License: GNU General Public License (GPL) ... Changes:... This release adds a button (and keyboard shortcut) to open the Talk... Digger page for an article in the default Web browser. ... ..."

"Since Google searches don t turn up much of value here, I m curious if there are any folks out there reading this that work with Python and are in the Ann Arbor or Detroit area. I don t see signs of an established PUG around here."

"A lighthearted comparison of how successful fiction authors and language designers can accidentally paint themselves into a corner in their first work."

"xmlrpcserver is a small and simple but fairly... complete XML-RPC server module for Python,... implemented on top of the standard module... xmlrpclib. This module may, for example, be used... in CGIs, inside application servers or within an... application, or even standalone as an HTTP server... waiting for XML-RPC requests. xmlrpcserver is... completely written in Python and has no... dependencies other than standard modules."

"yublib is a simple Python library that allows... developers to integrate yubnub into their... applications. ... ... License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) ... Changes:... Commands now return in alpha order. yncs now shows... eight commands across when listing commands. ... ..."

"MUSCLE (Multi User Server Client Linking... Environment) is an N-way messaging server and... networking API. It includes client-side networking... APIs for various languages, including C, C++, C#,... Delphi, Java, and Python. MUSCLE lets programs... communicate over a network via streams of... serialized Message objects. The included server... program ("muscled") lets its clients message each... other and store information in its server-side... hierarchical database. The database supp..."

"libextractor is a library used to extract meta-data from files of arbitrary type. It is designed to use helper-libraries to perform the actual extraction, and to be trivially extendable by linking against external extractors for additional file types. The goal is to provide developers of file-sharing networks, file managers, and WWW-indexing bots with a universal library to obtain meta-data about files. It includes a shell-command and bindings for Java (JNI) and Python. ... ... License: GNU Gen..."

"Formulas, dates, numbers support..."

"Phillip J. Eby recently said: 'unittest has gotten something of a bad rap, I think. Regardless of whether you like its basic testing facilities or not, it is an extremely good framework. In fact, I think it's one of the most beautiful frameworks in the Python standard library. Its functionality is cleanly separated into four roles, each of which can be filled by any object implementing the right interface: runners, loaders, cases, and results. Because of this exceptionally clean factoring, the basic framework is amazingly extensible.' I couldn't agree more, which is why I recently converted CherryPy's ad hoc test suite to one based on unittest."

A commenter on my Madlibs story (Blake Winton) complained that his perfectly valid email address was being refused by my email validator. His email address has a plus sign in it, and my validator didn't like it. I was using this regex: (more..)

generated on Tue 16 of Aug, 2005 at 01:32:19 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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