Creosote archive for Fri 19 of Aug, 2005

Zope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom applications.

Not sure if I need this but its Metadata, and Metadata is cool+

Parse RSS and Atom feeds in Python. 2000 unit tests. Open source.

Information Aesthetics is a blog focusing on the intersection of art and information presentation. It's chock-full of those cool arty projects involving databases, data feeds, graphs, scupltures, all that jazz. For example: (more..)

"Dallas PyCon bid accepted" Yay! PyCon moves out of the grey D.C. area. And it moves for 2006 to one of my favorite cities, Dallas, where I lived (Irving) from 1994 to 1996.

Non-Programmers Tutorial For Python (http://rupert.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/easytut/)

파이썬 웹 프레임워크

Includes link to the Python Grimoire site

Nick's blog about software, python, java, os x, and computers

It runs on top of zope. It is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities.

From the gambit email list, I respond to this question about writing macros... In your opinion, is it appropriate to use a macro to abstract away repetitive boiler-plate code? Or is this better done in a procedure? This is almost always a procedural abstraction rather than syntax, especially for beginners with Lisp... better to spend a lot of time with just procedural abstraction, higher-order functions, etc. Syntactical abstraction I use for controlling the order of evaluation and sometimes to put a pretty syntax around use of lambda. As an example an old Lisp control structure is called PROG1. This structure takes a sequence of statements, evaluates each in order, and returns the result of the first statement after the last has been evaluated.

XUL+LivePage(AJAX) == Goodness

I’m indebted to Ryan for bringing Clay Shirky’s online catalog of articles to my attention. While reading Clay’s “Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview” article (a totally smashing, almost to the point of being devastating piece of writing, by the way!), I almost jumped out of my chair when I ran into the “this will work because it will be good if it did” fallacy. Yes, the field of software is littered with these kinds of fallacies. Take the myth of the code reuse, for example.

Hah, finally I have real broadband! I've been using a 128k "JetStart" link from paradise net for the last few years, but I just moved up to a "bliink 2Mb lite" plan from IHUG. $5 cheaper per month and 20X faster. Comment

We desire the woman Who sees more virtue in us Than we see ourselves But we can't trust Their judgement When they can't see Our flaws

I recently listened to Kent Beck speaking on Developer Testing. It's an interesting and entertaining talk. Kent is passionate and articulate about developers doing testing. (more..)

Max is re-reading a Harry Potter, and asked me what "chuffed" meant. He said it sounded bad, but the context made it seem good. Let's just say I'm chuffed to have found The Best of British, which explains these sorts of things to us Yanks.

Today we had a need to extend the CPSSharedCalendar a little bit in a separate project. The functionality needed was not seen as generic enough to go into the CPSSharedCalendar itself. Luckily, since it's written with Five, this can be done easily, and without touching the original code, or monkey patching, and with none of the standard problems of using portal_skins.

Give Up Reconstruction Site The Vice and Virtue Ministry Inside the System Is the Spark Please Describe Yourself Employment...

Last week I decided to build a map of the wireless access point in the Town. It is not really easy to find the right tools, so I decided to write this little Howto. To archive this goal you need severals tools: Kismet First install Kismet. You need a wireless card that support RFMon in monitor mode.

Well, the world already knows about my friend Shumon's first public Python project, pykpass, because I saw it on the Daily Python-URL this morning and it's in the Cheeseshop too. Nice work, Shuggie!> >This was Shumon's first attempt at wrapping a C library in Python, and I got to help him with a few tiny bits. In the process, I learned way more about the Python C API than I previously knew.

Last week, Ian Landsman wrote about leaving features out in order to get a product out the door, and I promised to write about delaying a product to make it stronger. One thing about writing a blog is that, as long as you’re honest, you give yourself an automatic history. Something you can look back and reflect on. For example, on May 10th, I wrote that the Zesty News alpha was feature complete, and that there was only bug fixing and interface cleanup to go.

Understand up front that I’m not saying that Joel is wrong about how he develops software. Joel’s comment in The Project Aardvark Spec about extreme programming doesn’t seem to fully appreciate what goes on (or is supposed to go on) in an XP project. As I worked through the screens that would be needed to allow either party to initiate the process, I realized that Aardvark would be just as useful, and radically simpler, if the helper was required to start the whole process.

I used the term "meteoric rise" the other day to describe someone rapidly climbing through the ranks, achieving greater and greater status as they went. It's a common phrase used to refer to unusually fast success. But unless I'm mistaken, meteors don't rise at all.

Stephen O'Grady is thinking about the benefits of community in domains other than software: Anyway, maybe it's just because the benefits of community are so obvious in the world of software, but it seems like a no-brainer to me that other industries would benefit from a bit of community building themselves. I've already written a little bit about the Creating Passionate Users tutorial at OSCON, but there were a few phrases and ideas that smacked me in the side of the head, and left my head ringing like a bell. One of them was this: "Where this is passion, there is community". It seems so obvious, but when I heard it, it was still like a smack in the head.

The OSCON 2005 PostgreSQL Presentations are up, but a bunch of them are in OpenOffice format. I went through the pain of installing OpenOffice to convert them to PDF. For completeness, I have also included the presentations that were already available as PDF. Chris Browne: Replicating PostgreSQL Databases Using Slony-I Event Propagation in Slony-I Sample Replication RT/3 Upcoming Slony-I Enhancements Joe Conway: Terrabytes of Business Intelligence Lance Obermeyer: Running PostgreSQL On Windows Bruce Momjian: State of PostgreSQL 8.1 Porting PostgreSQL To Windows Aaron Thul: PostgreSQL Built Your Car Robert Treat: Explaining Explain

deFuze.org Weblog Planet CherryPy Sylvain Hellegouarch, A.K.A. "Lawouach" has become a close colleague of mine lately, so I'm happy he's joined the Weblogging world. Sylvain is one of the core developers of CherryPy, my favorite Python Web server toolkit by far (the recent hullaballo over Django led me to have a peek, and run quickly back to CherryPy hacking).

We're currently experimenting with various optimization techniques for our databases using PostgreSQL's features, and we've become quite interested in the Table Partitioning in PostgreSQL 8.1. Bizgres has this feature now (amongst others that will likely benefit our app) in its 0.7 release, so I decided to give it a whirl. Installing Bizgres 0.7 on Mac OS X is easy enough, but it loses a few points (no big deal, it's beta): The installer doesn't use Apple's installer, it uses some InstallAnywhere crap that I don't really trust The installer is probably one of the ugliest things I have ever seen on Mac OS X outside of perversiontracker It throws a readline library in a Fink-owned location if it's not already there (install_name_tool, anyone?!) It doesn't install any sort of preference pane, StartupItem, or GUI tools at all The demos are there, but they're sitting in tar files... wtf? Installing on FreeBSD er..

Some news about the xmlschema component. First, you may want to check the doctest over there : http://svn.nuxeo.org/trac/pub/file/z3lab/zope/xmlschema/trunk/README.txt I did some changes so that it's possible now to register the XML Schema document via ZCML such as this : <configure xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"> <XMLSchema id="sample" document="src/zope/xmlschema/tests/examples/simple.xsd" /> </configure> Then the directive register a named utility within the global utility registy of Zope3 that will be used by the dedicated XSD handler. Now, to use it from you class def you just need to give the id (name) of the registred schema such as : >>> import zope.interface >>> import zope.xmlschema >>> class IFoo(zope.interface.Interface): ... zope.xmlschema.set('sample') A new feature as well the validation : the handler perform an XML Schema validation against the XMLSchema.xsd from the w3c. If you want to test this package (or help right :)) be sure to check the deps.

/usr/ports/databases/postgresql-contrib comes with the very useful (until 8.1, anyway) pg_autovacuum daemon, but no rc script. Here's one I whipped up: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/019.pg_autovacuum.sh #!/bin/sh # # PROVIDE: pg_autovacuum # REQUIRE: postgresql # KEYWORD: FreeBSD shutdown # Add the following line to /etc/rc.conf to enable `pg_autovacuum': # # pg_autovacuum_enable="YES" # # . /etc/rc.subr pg_autovacuum_enable=${pg_autovacuum_enable:-"NO"} pg_autovacuum_flags=${pg_autovacuum_flags:-"-v 300 -V 0.5"} name=pg_autovacuum rcvar=`set_rcvar` command=/usr/local/bin/pg_autovacuum load_rc_config ${name} command_args="-D ${pg_autovacuum_flags}" pg_autovacuum_user=pgsql run_rc_command "$1"I did submit a PR with this by way of send-pr, but it doesn't seem to have ended up in the PR repository.

Today a courier delivered the hotel contract for PyCon 2006, countersigned by the hotel's staff. PyCon 2006 in Dallas is now confirmed!...

"World timezone definitions, modern and historical"

"Kerberos5 Password Verification Function"

"Plot data on map projections with matplotlib"

"OpenRelease automates the packaging, release and announcements of Open Source software."

!-- newsinfo datetime="8/18/2005 01:21:00 AM" id="112435329248713246" --> Simple digit grouping</div

"This is a signals implementation for python. It is similar to the pydispatch module."

"Brian asked me to explain what benefits I'm expecting from a ctypes version of OpenGL versus the PyOpenGLSWIG version."

"Thought this was worth pointing out since the Durus guys don't seem to make PR much of a priority."

I seem to have left my iPod playing when I got home last night, 'cos it was dead this morning. I hate commuting without music. (It's happy enough now though - it was just the battery.) Besides which, being the nerd I am, I had to knock this up to make sure that my metadata is still correct...

generated on Fri 19 of Aug, 2005 at 01:32:11 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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