Creosote archive for Thu 06 of Oct, 2005

like feedparser, this python library looks, smells and tastes good!

Where the Py_BEGIN_ALLOW_THREADS macro is defined.

very nice personal GTD (desktop)

Python is very suitable for working with the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. But working directly with a protocol can be a bit messy. Fortunately, there is a library that can simplify this work: Python-IRCLib. This article, the first of three parts, t

The complete unexpurgated scripts of the original TV series

This book: Producing Open Source Software appears to be a good read from what I have seen so far (full text available on-line or on paper from O'Reilly). Thanks to  Rooneg::Weblog: Producing Open Source Software and others for the link.

This Python Paste Power helps a lot in explaining PythonPaste. The comments also show that key players are already aware of and hopefully working on the issues between TurboGears and PythonPaste so that they will work together beautifully. I believe that is the best solution to the deployment of Python Web Applications that is in sight (or even on the horizon) at the moment.

I have just installed TurboGears and this comparison has struck me.The philosophy reminds me of Ubuntu which I like. I see this in the way the plans are to work with other projects, not collect code and to provide a good way to do things without lots of indirection to give so much choice that the while becomes unwieldy. Oh and to have good documentation and a professional look. The installation also reminds me of Ubuntu, i.e.

Sometimes I get stuck obsessing about tiny details. Recently I decided to give my RSS link a standard orange badge. But instead of using an image, I did it with CSS. I'd seen it done before, but I couldn't find the example I'd seen, so I cobbled it together from some other bits and pieces: (more..)

Spent the half of the day after the management meeting pouring over the PySNMP codebase, trying to decide whether to use PySNMP 4.x or whether to try to teach PySNMP-se 3.5.x how to handle full-featured Agent-side operations. Still no particular reso...

Due to overwhelming (two people) demand, I’ve made another release of pypwsafe. This version includes a Distutils-powered setup.py script. I also registered the release with PyPI (the Python Cheese Shop): pypwsafe 0.0.2 This was my first setup.py script so please let me know if I screwed anything up.

I can’t believe, as I’m writing this, that the day came when I’d be complaining about the 37signals product! But, hey, nothing is imperfect! Initially, I was floored when the Writeboard was released. Exactly what I needed, my dream came true. But then, after sending one of the first products over to my wife for a quick revision, a cold shower of rude awakening hit me.

John, of course, writes the OS X reviews for ars technica. (If you haven't read these, you need to. His level of detail should make lesser reviewers think hard about finding another career.) In his blog, he's been talking about what Apple needs to do to avoid another Copland scenario, i.e., avoid resting on their OS X achievments only to wake up in 2010 and realize, "Oh crap! It's WAY easier to write apps for Windows than for OS X!" Which is a rather long introduction to the quote I liked so much: My instincts tell me that both C# and Java are too low-level.

I added a new feature on Copia: Every day there will be an automated posting with mine and Chime's del.icio.us links from the previous day. You can see, in the previous Copia entry to this one, an example of the results. What I think most cool is how easy it was to write, and how easy the resulting code is to understand. It's just 35 lines (including 7 lines of imports) , and in that it packs some useful features I haven't found in other such scripts, including: Full Unicode safety (naturally, I wouldn't have it any other way) support for multiple del.icio.us feeds, with tag by author tagging the PyBlosxom entry with the aggregated/unique tags from the del.icio.us entries Here's the code. The only external requirement is Amara: import os import sets import time import codecs import itertools from datetime import date, timedelta from amara import binderytools TAGBASE = 'http://del.icio.us/tag/' #Change BASEDIR and FEEDS to customize BASEDIR = '/srv/www/ogbuji.net/copia/pyblosxom/datadir' FEEDS = ['http://del.icio.us/rss/uche', 'http://del.icio.us/rss/chimezie'] now = time.gmtime() timestamp = unicode(time.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', now)) targetdate = (date(*now[:3]) - timedelta(1)).isoformat() #Using Amara.

A friend is negotiating a contract to develop a piece of software. It's to be a fixed-price contract, and it will be a lot of work (in the tens of thousands of lines of code). I've never charged in this way, so I don't know how to advise him. How do you choose a price for a fixed-price contract? Obviously you can choose an hourly rate, and multiply by an estimate of hours, but estimates have risk, especially with a project as large as this.

I have not tried the new MSFT Office Ribbon, so I will withhold judgement for now. Others are noting the amount of real estate the ribbon requires. The only thing I want to point out here is we have gone full circle from ribbons to menus and back. The first GUI applications I developed were CAD tools.

Unless you have prior knowledge of it, everything your mind puts forth as a possible inference-from-the-name for the ruby2shoes application is wrong.

A while back I wondered if ElementTree or lxml could be used with ZPT. Answer: yes. Here's how. First, let's discuss why. Let's say you want do deal with XML coming from somewhere else.

«I downloaded and played for a few minutes with yaxl, which stands for Yet Another (Pythonic) XML Library. It's interesting and has some potential, but I'm not sure how well it will "compete" (I hate using that word in relation to open source projects, but I can't come up with a more appropriate one just now) with a project such a ElementTree.»

«SegyPY includes M-files to read and write SEG-Y files from Python, implemented using the syntax of the SEG-Y format, commonly used for storing seismic data. ... Changes: This release adds supprt for writing all variants of SEGY (revision 0 and 1), except for IBM floats, in data sample format. ...»

«Whats On Air is a suite of programs aimed at handling radio station metadata. ... Changes: This release is finally modular: now the parsers for the radio stations aren't hard-coded into the program. ...»

«I just realized (thanks to a ping from Scott) that I never released the Python code I wrote a while back that can read Password Safe files. I use this code practically every day but there s no reason why I can t let others join in on the fun. This first release contains a library, the pure Python implementations of Blowfish and SHA-1 which my library uses, and a console script that lets you interactively search through you Password Safe files. That s everything you need to read your files on Linux, Macintosh, and even Windows machines (as long as you have Python installed, of course).»

«Benji York, a relatively recent Zope Corporation employee, first appeared on my "does interesting stuff" radar due to his work with Zope 3 testing: zope.testbrowser, which promises to bring to Zope 3 testing something I played with before in the context of Silva but never really made very usable: functional testing of the web frontend of code on the server side (utilizing mechanize). Benji's innovation to make this really easy is by integrating it with doctests. ... This is not the only thing Benji has been up to though; today I discovered his new weblog, where he says good stuff on a topic close to my heart: Zope 3 marketing. Moreover he is actually doing something about it. He's written the beginnings of a Zope 3 quickstart guide that should help people on their way when learning Zope 3.»

From Mark Paschal, a good idea for a website: mileage.project. Records your car's petrol consumption and compares it to that of other people with the same car. pricewatch.co.nz already has a lot of this data for NZ drivers with company cars... Comment

«Yet Another (Pythonic) XML Library»

«The Five team is happy to release Five 1.1 final.»

«Use ListMixin to create custom list classes from a small subset of list methods . ...»

«PySCTP offers Python bindings for the SCTP transport protocol. ... Changes: Almost all functions of the Draft 10 SCTP API specification have been implemented. Some code cleanups and small bugfixes were made along with some API changes, mostly in constant names.»

«I am taking over the maintenance and support of py2exe from Thomas Heller. As he announced a few weeks ago he is looking to focus on other things. py2exe has been very useful to me over the years and I look forward to keeping it every bit as useful in the future.»

I now understand why so many developers on MS Windows cling to Java so tightly, it's their saviour from the hellish experience that is Microsoft Visual C++.> >Developing cross-platform applications on a Mac or a Linux machine is not that difficult. Getting those same applications to build on a MS Windows platform is not that difficult. The problem is, what if someone needs to do development work of cross-platform software in the MSVC++ environment? It is possible, but the amount of work required is immense.

generated on Thu 06 of Oct, 2005 at 01:32:06 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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