Creosote archive for Mon 17 of Oct, 2005

Cron for Windoze

I don’t have any statistics to share on this, but something that has just occurred to me is that there have been several instances over the past couple of weeks where people have mentioned that they’re new to Python while they’re asking questions about TurboGears. Python has been my language of choice for a decade, and I’m happy to be contributing in some way to growing Python’s usage.

Compare and contrast

Ben Bangert talks about Python Web Framework Niches, specifically detailing TurboGears and Django. I think he’s on the mark that each framework defines its niche based on what it’s asked to do. The best APIs are ones that solve real problems for applications, and not ones that are just created because something sounds neat or potentially useful. The part that Ben leaves out is the matter of taste (which I touch upon in a comment).

People have been reporting recently that pycs.net has been going down a lot. I just noticed a minute ago that it had stopped responding to queries, and also that one PostgreSQL process was indicating that it was doing a SELECT query for the the 'pycs' user. straceing the two processes revealed this: # strace -p (pid of python process) Process 10043 attached - interrupt to quit send(4, "s_spam=0 AND usernum=377 AND pos"..., 42, 0 <unfinished ...> # strace -p (pid of postgres process) Process 10051 attached - interrupt to quit send(8, "/www.pills-best.com/online-pharm"..., 8192, 0 <unfinished ...> i.e., PyCS is sending an SQL query while Postgres is sending a response, presumably to another query. I wonder what's happening here.

localroger of Kuro5hin is a great American essayist of the internet era.

tkinter wck 1.1b1 is 1.1a2 plus some robustness tweaks. Enjoy! [image: "construction"]

My son Nat has had a number of tutors over the years. Through trial and error, we discovered that the best tutors were not the ones with the best training. Although training helped, the most important things in a tutor were a natural predisposition to working hard with a sometimes unwilling student; an enthusiasm I sometimes refered to as "over-caffeinated"; and a centered-ness that allowed the tutor to persevere even when the student was overtly hostile. One of our tutors who fit this description to a T was Danielle Strachman. She is now in San Diego, and has a blog, Heightened Learning, which covers educational topics of all sorts. (more..)

Python source code for the Ocemp GUI evaluation is here.

The first part of this GUI comparison is done. The Ocemp GUI demo screen has been created, and is online, with image, and a discussion is attached. The code itself will be in a follow-up post.

I've decided to choose a real license for the software I post on this site, since responsible readers have asked me what license I use. I find the array of open source licenses baffling, so I dug up some resources: (more..)

&laquo;This function accepts a string and returns a string with whitespace ( one space ) inserted between words with leading capitalized letters . ...&raquo;

&laquo;Generates an infinite character pasword...&raquo;

&laquo;This is my implementation of Rendering Arbitrary Objects with Nevow using CherryPy 2.1. CherryPy doesn't care about adapters or stuff like that, but since it is written in Python it is easy to add that sort of functionality.&raquo;

&laquo;In the beginning Guido created Python. Now Python was formless and empty, duplicate code was over the surface of programs. And Guido said, Let there be modules and there were modules. Guido saw that the modules were good, and he separated them from the programs. Guido called them the standard library . And there was the library, and there was the program -- the first abstraction. Now, not all of us are lucky enough to be able to toss things into the Python stdlib. The practice has arisen in Twisted to take functionality that is generally useful -- not specific to Twisted -- and place it in the twisted.python package. There's an option parser and file path manipulation functions and so forth. This works okay for Twisted development, but the code can't really be re-used without creating a Twisted dependency (which is okay by me, mind you, but I hear it's inconvenient for some other people). Later, at Divmod, a similar derivative practice became common. Common functionality that wasn't really specific to our projects was aggregated in a module named atop.tpython -- the tpython being short for, of course, twisted.python . So now we're two levels abstracted from where we really want to be. Well, a new day is upon us. Divmod has now released Epsilon, a package for some generally useful code that others might find handy.&raquo;

!-- newsinfo datetime="10/16/2005 08:53:00 AM" id="112947802284853554" --> Chad Crabtree: pyc -- python compiler in python</div

&laquo;The deadline for PyCon proposals is now three weeks away; proposals must be received by Oct. 31st.&raquo;

&laquo;This recipe is Python implementation of few lines of C-code that get useful information about current working console on Windows. It may be useful for console application to proper formatting output.&raquo;

&laquo;This little class starts up an SMTP server which acts as an email sink, collecting all received emails destined for any address. All emails are routed to a Portable Unix Mailbox file. This is very handy for testing applications that send email.&raquo;

&laquo;Kamaelia is a networking/communications infrastructure for innovative multimedia systems. Kamaelia uses a component architecture designed to simplify creation and testing of new protocols and large scale media delivery systems.&raquo;

I have a lot of Python rss/atom feeds in my aggregator and entries are doubled all over the place. Could'nt find any tool that would merge entries from several sources out there, in a smart way, by trying to find doublons. I wrote a little script, extending Mark Pilgrim's feedparser we use in CPSRSS, to merge several sources, using the difflib module and the rss rendering we have in CPSBlog. It calculates the diff ratio on the title and content of each entry to decide wheter it's the same entry. When the ratio is <= 0.2 it's the same entry (hopefully :) ) Here's an example ran on these: http://www.planetpython.org/rss20.xml http://www.artima.com/buzz/feeds/python.rss http://blogs.nuxeo.com/sections/aggregators/all_posts/exportrss http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/index_rss The result is here (It's a one-shot xmlfile, made today, so it's not a real feed  it is still readable by any client though) Now I've been told that this was pretty useless, and that i would better make some clean in my feeds and do more interesting stuff in my spare time. But i can't help it: everytime i see a feed related to python I just add the stuff  to my client :').

&laquo;Zope Object Database: object database and persistence&raquo;

&laquo;Zope Object Database: object database and persistence&raquo;

&laquo;Thanks to contributions from Sune Kirkeby and Hugo, Django's cache and middleware systems got some huge improvements over the weekend. Django-served pages are now, by default, cache-friendly. That is, they output Vary HTTP headers behind the scenes, to instruct caching servers (such as Squid or other proxies) when to cache and what to cache by.&raquo;

Interesting energy this evening. The Baha'is were all off at feast, so we secular humanists (and a Pentacostal Christian) spent the first few hours discussing God, evolution, and dating. We actually spent the whole evening in my bedroom (which conver...

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