2005-08-25 03:22
Diary - Andrew Kuchling: Anyone want to make PyCon 2005 podcasts?
At www.pycon.org/talks/, you can browse through a collection of recorded talks from PyCon 2005. They'd probably be more accessible to the community if they were available as podcasts. Does anyone out there want to work on producing the right RSS...
2005-08-25 02:50
Diary - Andrew Kuchling: Atom 1.0 template for Movable Type
With the help of a document describing the changes between Atom 0.3 and 1.0, I've updated this weblog's feed to Atom 1.0. You can download the Movable Type 2.661 template as atom-1.0.xml. Unfortunately, I can't think of any good way...
2005-08-25 02:39
Copia - Beyond HTML tidy
...or "Are you a chef? 'Cause you keep feeding me soup."
2005-08-25 02:35
XML.com: Should Python and XML Coexist?
"Leslie Michael Orchard announced a module xslfilter.py for WSGI--Python Web Server Gateway Interface."
2005-08-25 01:35
Ned Batchelder: Log Parser
Jeff Atwood extolls the virtues of Microsoft Log Parser. It provides a SQL syntax for querying log files of diverse heritages. It sounds very cool, and damn handy. From a quick look through the source he provides, I didn't see how to plug in new input parsers, though the architecture diagram he shows has a block for them. With CSV and XML inputs available, I guess you could transform anything you like into something it could eat even without plugins.
2005-08-25 00:46
Logicalware - MailManager
mailmanager is the leading email response management solution and is already used by thousands of people every day to deal with email in call centres, businesses, education and government.
2005-08-25 00:46
dirtSimple.org: Python Is Not Java
python rules, java and xml often suck
2005-08-25 00:37
XML.com: Should Python and XML Coexist?
xml is often bad, usually unnecessary
2005-08-25 00:13
Groovie: Handling Form data with Formencode + SQLObject
Two of my favorite and most often-used Python packges are formencode and sqlobject. Using these packages together is done fairly often, but I’ve rarely seen any documentation describing a full form display, validation, and insert into a database of new data from said form. In this example, I’ve tried to wean down the code as much as possible to get a very concise snippet (only 12 lines of web page Controller code) that will: Display a new form to the user Handle form submission Validate the form Coerce form values into the proper types for the database Insert the form data to the database, or Display the form with error messages, and maintain their values The nice thing about using formencode, is that 3 of the 6 steps I listed above are handled by it in a fairly automatic way. Formencode will check the data given a form schema, coerce the values into the Python types you ask for, fill in errors should they occur, and maintain the existing values. I’ll be using Myghty for this, but since all I’m really pulling from it is the request args, it should be pretty obvious what to change for whatever web framework makes you happy. formencode First, lets take a look at our basic form: # myform.myt <html> <head><title>basic form</title></head> <body> <form action="/mypage" method="post"> Username: <input type="text" name="username" size="26" /> <form:error name="username"> Age: <input type="text" name="age" size="3" /> <form:error name="age"> <input type="submit" value="Send it" /> </form></body></html> To validate this, we’ll setup a formencode form schema to run this through.
2005-08-25 00:00
Jabber Libraries
Python
2005-08-24 23:00
Lesscode.org: Software Industrialization Or Software Craft?
If I were to state that software industry is in crisis, I would be guilty of stating the obvious. The field of software development has been in crisis ever since the early ‘90s, if not even earlier than that. But what’s important is to realize that nowadays, this crisis has reached major proportions. I know I sound like yet another ‘the sky is falling’ FUD protagonist, but there simply isn’t any other way to look at the problem.
2005-08-24 21:24
Spyced: Code Jam 2005
I tried my hand against around 5000 other programmers in Google's Code Jam 2005. Last year Windows corrupted the hell out of itself halfway through, when I had foolishly not saved any work. The time and concentration lost rebooting killed me.
2005-08-24 21:08
Making It Stick (Patrick Logan): WikiWYG
WYSIWYG in a Wiki. Nice feature. Horrible acronym. It's a Wiki with better in-line editing.
2005-08-24 20:57
Dirt Simple: Tropical Storm Inbound - Signing off for now
This lovely little storm is making a beeline for my house at the moment, and unlike last year's far-out, slow-moving storms, this one is close in, giving me barely a day and a half of notice before it shows up.> >While there is a good chance it'll miss, or just be a tropical storm, there's also some chance of a direct hit, and my roof is currently un-shingled - in the midst of being replaced to repair damage from last year's storm. So, I'm going to be busy for a few days. And even if it's a near hit or just a tropical storm, I may be without power and/or 'net for some time thereafter.
2005-08-24 18:47
Open Sauce: Open Sauce Podcast #1
In our first Open Sauce podcast we chat with Andrew Veitch, CEO of Logicalware about open source VC investment, MailManager and open source software development, and the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow Patrick Harvie tells us he's been banned from installing Firefox on Scottish Parliament computers and talks about an encounter with a Microsoft lobbyist. We round off with a brief visit to the Edinburgh Linux User Group.It has been great fun putting the podcast together, and we would like to thank everyone who has helped, incuding Music Creation, DJ Brainstorm from Edinburgh's Pure , Chris Dooks, Patrick Harvie MSP and the folks at EdLug.Download the Open Sauce podcastMP3 (17.3 Mb)Ogg Vorbis (11.4 Mb)Enjoy!
2005-08-24 18:43
Diary - Andrew Kuchling: Equation array test
Test of a new feature in the MT-Math plugin; if you use "class='eqnarray'" instead of 'class='eq'", it will typeset the equations using the eqnarray environment. This came up in Barb's most recent entry. Getting this working was rather painful;...
2005-08-24 16:27
JotSite - Hoang Do: Cluster Sizes
I have run into a similar problem to the default-allocation waste that is encountered when using the hard-disk. However, as that I am currently working in the data networking arena, that is where it occurs. First, let me just review...
2005-08-24 14:55
Open Sauce: MailManager Banner
Richard X has recently provided us with some nice new banners to promote the 30 day free trial of MailManager to coincide with a forthcoming direct mail campaign.So, feel free to give MailManager a try! We think it will help you breathe more easily ...
2005-08-24 08:16
Sean McGrath: Spam inspection tip
You have run your spam filters and now have a folder full of mails that have been marked as spam. You want to quickly check through them for false positives. Sort them by sender rather than by date. If your spam is anything like mine there are lots of d
2005-08-24 08:06
Robert Brewer: CherryPy now handles partial GETs
Partial GET requests are a handy way for a client to request a portion of a resource, rather than the entire resource. HTTP clients send a Range: bytes=start-stop request header, where start and stop are non-negative integers. The HTTP server can then send only those bytes (inclusive) in the response.
2005-08-24 06:53
Ted Leung on the Air: Back from Foo
I've posted my photos of Foo Camp on Flickr. After the weekend, I'm a big fan of the totally unstructured self organizing conference. Of course, I was a big fan of this format before Foo Camp -- the Apache Hackathon and the PyCon sprints are some of my favorite events because of the self organization and the people involved. So it wasn't a surprise that I enjoyed the format.
2005-08-24 03:47
Nuxeo: Coming soon : CPS Rich Client based on Eclipse RCP
Introduction Here, at Nuxeo, we are thinking for a long time at desktop applications for CPS. Why in this new full web, ajaxified, world ? :-) Well, I think that for many applications and features, a desktop application is still needed. Here is some examples of features / requirements : Disconnected client to work in the train, in the plane, on the beach :-) read, annotate, search in a document repository use electronics forms when working outside the office Deep integration with legacy desktop applications (what about having OpenOffice running inside a dedicated client to improve cooperative work) Strong security : document signing, workflow action signing, etc. Advanced text edition : interactive diff / merge Advanced editors (photos, rich media, rich documents, etc.) Reduce server loads doing many computation on the client many, many more ideas :-) We started to work, as some customers asked, on a desktop application. One point was clear: limit the burden of deployment! Rich Client ? We studied deeply Flash, Mozilla and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). Flash was not standalone enough and too tied to graphics. Mozilla seemed fine, but the current framework is too young (we were told by a proeminent Mozilla developer to wait for Mozilla 2.0 before investing on the technology) and not enough adapted to generic application, plus it needed us to write in C++ and had some fear about cross-platform compilation. Eclipse RCP came then and we quickly discovered that it proposes an amazingly "sexy" framework, extensible, component-oriented and very well designed. But, besides those technical considerations, we mainly found that Eclipse RCP proposes a new approach and a new paradigm for desktop applications...
2005-08-24 01:37
PyEphem 3.7a
"PyEphem provides scientific-grade astronomical computations for the Python programming language."
2005-08-24 01:34
Ivan Krstic: Beware the Frankenweb
"Ian is a smart guy. He wrote some cool software, and generally seems to have a clue in an industry that's plagued by lack thereof. From reading his blog, it's clear he gets a lot of things right. And I think he gets some of it very, very wrong. Ian sees WSGI and Paste as a solution to the now-infamous Python web framework proliferation problem. His basic reasoning is solid: any mature language will develop a number of frameworks, so there is no reason for Python to envy some other languages for having just one of note. But from there, Ian takes it in the completely wrong direction. He calls on framework developers to unite over WSGI and Paste, allowing components to be 'implemented separately and in a highly decoupled way using WSGI middleware'."
2005-08-24 01:32
Ivan Krstic: Beauty against complexity
My friend Dan is spending his third summer in a row working at the MIT-Harvard Broad institute hacking on computational biology software. He normally works on his C++ genome cruncher called motifADE, but today he wrote a helper application which performs some computations on gene expression data. I was surprised when he told me he wrote the helper in Java. Dan's as much a Python fan as I am, so we talked a bit about his language choice.
2005-08-24 01:28
Allegra: Public RDF - Example and Application
"Public RDF can be applied by simple computer system to validate, store, query, index, map and eventually infer information modeled as contextual resource descriptions about well articulated text."
2005-08-24 01:28
Making It Stick (Patrick Logan): SAP Trex Search Engine and Python
"Interesting comment from Andrew Barnard: 'SAP uses Python as an integral part of the TREX product and has done so for many years. Perhaps Shai is not aware of the extent to which open source products are used by SAP?'"
2005-08-24 01:28
Groovie: Fragmenting A Framework Userbase
"I've been thinking a lot lately about web programmers and the web frameworks they choose, or don't choose, and why. I'm mainly going to talk about Python Web Frameworks as the majority of them have small communites, and possible reasons this could be."
2005-08-24 01:28
Open Sauce: Multi terabyte Plone
"In between MailManager we still do some Plone work. We had a interesting job to really scale Plone up to handle very large numbers of very large files. Plone itself is based on Zope and it was just some parts of the Zope infrastructure that began to fail as the size of the stored data grew."
2005-08-24 01:05
Second p0st - Phillip Pearson: Minimum warranty in the USA?
Does the USA have any laws specifying the minimum warranty for products? I notice that with Dell's new $499 laptop, the "base" price only includes a 90 day limited warranty. In New Zealand we have this law called the Consumer Guarantees Act that gives you certain rights relating to faulty goods - basically if something breaks unreasonably soon after purchase, you can always take it back for repair/replacement/refund. If a laptop with a 90 day warranty breaks down within a year or two, that's probably unreasonable, so you can call on the CGA to get yourself a new one. Comment
2005-08-24 00:34
Mike Fletcher: Guess it's time to start thinking about PyCon2006 presentations
The real question is what to present? The last two years I've done presentations on "black magic" (metaclasses and descriptors), and those were fun, but we've probably covered most of the interesting material in there. And even then, the presentation...
2005-08-24 00:31
mrevelle's log: Google Talk is Live
Google has launched Google Talk.It's a Jabber service, and gmail users can use their email address and password to login to talk.google.com.What's next?
