Creosote archive for Mon 03 of Oct, 2005

simple flat file database

rdiff + gpg backup

not even considering PHP?

In the last few weeks I've been gradually moving projects I maintain to Labix, which is using the Moin software as a CMS.Projects likeSmart Package Managerpython-dateutilpython-constraintand others are all being hosted there now. There's also a brand new issue tracker using Roundup.

Victor Moholy: A bad API, like a bad novel, feels like a trick: key information is withheld and simple relationships are hard to deduce. I had one of those "a-ha" moments reading this. ("A-ha," I thought. "I feel a rant coming on.") This is exactly why, after building probably one of the largest web applications done with OpenACS 3.2, I never managed to like the 4.x (and now 5.x) series of that toolkit. OpenACS 4.x and later suffer from Second-system syndrome.

PyBluez is an effort to create python wrappers around bluez to allow python developers to use system bluetooth resources

XML to DDL is a set of Python programs that converts an XML representation of a database into a set of SQL and back

Object Relational Manager for providing an object interface to your database, with tables as classes, rows as instances, and columns as attributes.

Django gets some fit competition in the Python MVC web framework space - it's mostly built from mature components, too

My prior post regarding Best of Breed Controllers got more notice than I had anticipated, I definitely didn’t expect the interesting discussion regarding object publishing history it spawned. But first, some corrections: Kevin Dangoor points out that CherryPy allows for computed URL traversal by having the parts of the URL passed into a default function with a function signature like def default(self, other, parts, of path):. On a side-note, I believe David Creemer is using this aspect in his use of Routes integration with CherryPy to some extent. Mike Watkins gives a great overview of Quixote on his blog.

I'm releasing. So, there's still work to do, but I get a working sample and I'll take a rest now :) Those interested may download the binaries; they come in two flavors, one with a debug screen to output some text to, and one graphical. Just install it as a regular homebrew, and upon launch the interpreter will start the 'script.py' file in the same directory as EBOOT.PBP.

I have republished the blog without comments. There will be no more comments until I can prevent the spam attacks. I have been all but unaffected until now.

In The Clingan Zone: Is AJAX a hack?  John is making good points about how a web browser can/should be used.But for me the key focus for web technologies and therefore for this debate is the separation between user client and server. When servers deliver over http then Web Browsers are only one potential client and the server should not need to care about the client. A danger with AJAX is that we tightly couple the server implementation to a specific client. The same danger is possible with all the alternatives to Web Browsers, using Java may help with cross platform issues, but loose coupling and REST based interfaces help even more with cross client issues. I believe that AJAX should/must not break all that we have learned in the move towards REST as an architecture for web applications.

BTW - I'm back in New Zealand. I was in Japan from the 10th to 25th of September. I got to see a new city, Kanazawa, and spend a bit more time in Tokyo. Kanazawa was funny; we were expecting this little country town, but it turns out that Kanazawa is about the size of Auckland, with 500K or so people in the city and a million or so total in the region.

Couldn't do anything on Saturday because I was playing with a new toy (iPod nano), but I woke up early today. And here it is... Now I'm wrapping the PSP APIs and there should be a release today :)

I’ve branched off into the new thread (from Should Database Manage The Meaning? thread ) in order to start from a clean slate. The previous thread still has a number of unanswered questions lingering, and I didn’t want to introduce new ones. What the lively debate in the ‘database and meaning’ thread revealed to me is that a number of people appear steeped in the shared data model/architecture. They’re all talking about multiple applications hitting a single database, and how that peculiar situation dictates stringent demands on what the database must be and how it must behave. I come from a different world.

Shane (darned poker addict) managed to start up a game during what was supposed to be an evening of coffee and chatting about lives, universes and whatnot. It was okay I suppose, but when you've got that many people playing (well, actually, always) i...

Such a scam He mutters Walking into Starbucks

The pleased Half-amused hum Of modern woman When a door Opens before her

I've been waiting a long time for mxTextTools 2.1, and I guess I have to accept that it's not going to move forward and take it under my own (rather over-crowded) wing if SimpleParse is going to move forward. I'd really rather not, but a patch-set fo...

I’ve been doing a lot of comparisons and research into various Python web frameworks lately, mainly focused on MVC oriented frameworks. Some of them have templating languages they come with, some not so much. The thing I have started to notice is how similar the Controller in them all is starting to look.

(quick link)

A new Zope product, CPSRelation, has been designed to handle RDF relations within  the CPS framework: it gives access to any kind of content RDF indexation and serialization, as well as querying features. CPSRelation offers RDF features installing a tool, portal_relations, that is able to manage several kinds of graphs. Another tool, portal_serializer, has been designed to provide object serializations via pluggable TALES expressions. We've been using IOBTree graphs to handle relations between documents, using their docid in the repository as unique identifiers. Now we can also handle RDF relations, provided by the rdflib Python library and the Redland framework. We have tested Redland graphs to index and serialize CPS content, and query relations created in the graph.

We published today the EuroPython 2005 CPS Platform R&D paper on cps-project.org that has been written as a refereed paper for this event.

My wife Susan will be on the Weekend Today show this Sunday, October 2nd. There'll be taped footage of the whole family (including me, I guess). It airs nationally on NBC, usually 8 to 9, though some places it's different, so check your local listings.

I've always believed in sharing. I'm searching for a fellow geek - preferably a Python aficionado - to share a virtual server account with me. ...

Leave it to Charles Miller, an Australian software engineer, to neatly sum up the origins of the USA's religious tensions: (more..)

The honeymoon is over and now we are getting to know each others foibles and learning to get along just fine. The most incredible experience so far has been running some very heavy lifting Jython-based XML processing pipelines in the background while stil

Over the last while I've been pleasantly surprised at the extent to which I can use OpenOffice on Linux to work with Word and Excel data. I've even created a few Word/Excel files and send to others without them being any the wiser that Word/Excel did not

«Background: Numeric is an add-on Python module that has seen widespread adoption. It enables Python to be used as a Scientific Computing Environment similar to MATLAB or IDL. Numeric was originally written nearly 10 years ago, and while still performing admirably, needed much updating to take advantage of the new features in Python and to remove old warts. SciPy Core 0.4.1 (beta): SciPy Core is a new system which builds on the code-base of Numeric, but implements features (such as advanced index-selection, and user-settable error modes). There are over 25 major new feature enhancements.»

«I'm pleased to announce that pyExcelerator 0.6.1a is now available for download. What can you do with pyExcelerator: Generating Excel 97+ files with Python 2.4+ (need decorators), importing Excel 95+ files, ... 0.6.1a (29.09.2005) - fixed: exception when reading OLE2 files with incorrect MSAT (sector ids points to nonexistense sectors). ...»

«web2ldap is a full-featured LDAP client written in Python and designed to run as a stand-alone Web gateway or under the control of a web server with FastCGI support (e.g., Apache with mod_fastcgi). ... Changes: Several improvements were made to the user interface. Some bugs were fixed.»

«Sometimes it's usefull to use MS-Excel as a gui front-end to your data (for viewing and processing), for example while debugging a program. This script makes this task simple.»

«IronPython is an implementation of Python running on Microsoft .NET / Mono. ... Changes: In addition to focusing on the CPython regression test suite and fixing bugs, this release also prepared IronPython for the PDC 2005 conference.»

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There has been lots of progress in the python world recently. I keep opening posts but not getting time to write them. So this is more a list than comment (well that is how it started, now grown a bit with comments about Leonardo).First lots related to Turbogears.

Because I'm fascinated by how your ranking in certain search engines can fluctuate so rapidly over even one day, I hacked out a script (easier than scanning through pages of results). Pass the script a query (in quotes) and the url (can just be the

Congrats to Abe Fettig on the launch of JotSpot Live. Abe was madly hacking on this during Gnomedex, and a few of us we able to do some collaborative note taking. Between JotSpot Live and Gobby, collaborative editing is popping up in more and more places.

Last week when I was walking through the kitchen, Julie stopped me so I could see the blog of Seattle-based classical singer Anne-Carolyn Bird (website). I popped the url into Firefox, but it has taken me a while to get to it. Anne-Carolyn's blog is a window into the life of an aspiring classical singer.

[via Chris Double's Radio Weblog ]: Chris Double reports that the Gwydion Dylan hackers have released fhe first beta for OpenDylan, which is the open sourced version of Harlequin/Functional Objects Dylan implementation. Since it generates native code, it's only available for x86, meaning Windows and Linux. Good thing Macs are going Intel.... In other Dylan related news, the Dylan Hackers placed 2nd in this year's ICFP contest.

&laquo;Dion Almaer from Ajaxian interviewed me (via email) about JotSpot Live today. The interview is available now, worth reading if you re interested in the technology and back story behind JotSpot Live.&raquo;

&laquo;MathDOM - Content MathML in Python&raquo;

&laquo;OLE2 files with incorrect MSAT entries ...&raquo;

On Friday, September 23rd, 2005, our baby boy Carlos Rodrigo was born. He took his time, almost 42 weeks to come out of the womb, but he made up for it by being the most beautiful thing I have seen and just plain lovable. My wife was very brave before, during and after the c-section and I love her.

Ease packaging your plugin with a help from a little bit of the CPAN tool chain.

I couldn&#8217;t resist jumping into the Choose a single layer of cleverness discussion, that is raging on David Heinemeier Hansson&#8217;s blog. The majority of the challenges to David&#8217;s thesis were so widly off mark, that it had left me completely bewildered. What&#8217;s even more bewildering, to me at least, is that many of the misplaced comments seem to be coming from established Ruby and Rails practitioners. Anywho, the comment that got my particular attention is quoted below; my full reply is reproduced below the quoted comment: &#8220;Just like I&#8217;d expect my operating system to respond if I try to write to a file I don&#8217;t have permission on, I want my database server to manage the basic rules of the DATA, ie, what relates to what, and which columns should be unique.

Well, today was (almost) the end of the first work-week under the new schedule. I spent the bulk of the day on cleanup and fixes, this is mostly because I'm expecting the next big task to take a few weeks, and I don't want to be backtracking to fix t...

Everything looks like a nail. Some things just work better as a traditional app, guys.

I indicated in my last article that I would begin blogging about a very misunderstood, and what I would consider unappreciated Python package called PythonPaste. Python Paste is currently undergoing a documentation and website update after which it will hopefully be much more useful for those wishing to use it, or even understand why they&#8217;d want to. To really get started with Python Paste its exceptionally useful to know about a package that is used extensively by Paste to accomplish some of the magic it performs. This package is setuptools by Phillip J.

There's rather an interesting thread going on over on c.l.py about private attributes and Python. It gave me the opportunity to post a link to one of my favourite c.l.py posts of all time, the Martellibot's wonderful essay decrying the "principle of least privilege". It should, as Steven D'Aprano says, be required reading for all developers, regardless of platform. Also in the thread, the effbot comes to my defense on the subject of the rationale behind Python's name mangling feature, and links to a facinating thread from depths of Python's history in which the feature is originally discussed, and which contains this from Guido:"Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need.

generated on Mon 03 of Oct, 2005 at 01:32:13 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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