Creosote archive for Tue 01 of Nov, 2005

A few ways on how to get curses to work multithreaded, in Python. Check the responses!

Last week, I decided it was finally time for me to learn a bit more about TurboGears, a great new Python web application "mega-framework" from Kevin Dangoor. I had watched the excellent screencast, peered through the documentation, and was impressed with what I saw. At work, I had been tasked with creating a web-based tool, and I had the basic requirements down in my head.

dnspython is a DNS toolkit for Python. It supports almost all record types. It can be used for queries, zone transfers, and dynamic updates. It supports TSIG authenticated messages and EDNS0.

"4Suite allows users to take advantage of standard XML technologies rapidly and to develop and integrate Web-based applications. It also puts practical technologies for knowledge management projects in the hands of developers. It is implemented in Python

Ka-Ping Yee, creator of pydoc, phd candidate at Berkley

I’m still mostly offline, but luckily UMTS offers a sort of solution. It works alright, but it is fairly expensive and I’m counting my bytes again. Still better than helplessly and hopelessly waiting for local telecom to fix ADSL, which judging by previous experience may happen who knows when. I’ve been looking for an Atom feed generator and I can’t find anything more than a few exploratory hacks.

A set of Python-based RDF tools, libraries, DSLs, and application servers

Carlos says this is sort of what I'm driving to with Hammer models

SBC is buying AT&T, renaming itself AT&T, and creating a new logo while it's at it. This has got the design community in an uproar. Design Observer has a thoughtful piece on the history of the AT&T graphic identity: The Final Days of AT&T. The comments are a long mudfight over the need for graphic design historical preservation, the absurdity of same, who designed what, and so on. It's juicy, in a narrow sort of way.

Thurs 17th November, see Biddulph, Willison and Trout in a Rails vs Django vs Catalyst punch-up over in AAARGH DOCKLANDS WHY ARE THESE THINGS ALWAYS IN BLOODY DOCKLANDS ahem

I have an affinity for long (and sometimes long-winded) science-fiction and fantasy books. A few days ago, I accidentally discovered that the 11th book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, Knife of Dreams, was released. I would love it if there were a way to get an RSS feed that contained announcements of new Robert Jordan titles.

We'll be doing a release of CPS 3.3.7 this week, after we fix a few more bugs, the most important one being: http://svn.nuxeo.org/trac/pub/ticket/1029 It won't include Jean-Marc Orliaguet's work on "boxless setup" (rendering based only on portlets) which is still a bit instable and should wait for the CMFSetup Geddon. So, CPS developers, please don't try new funky stuff this week (or try it in branches) and keep fixing bugs if you can. This release already looks like one of the best and strongest since the 3.3 branch has been started. Let's keep up the good work until friday.

Ruby is a fairly interesting programming language, from the “expressive” syntax to some of the absolutely bizarre documentation. For a Python programmer, the lack of predictability and almost excessively concise syntax (when just one more line would really make things a lot clearer) can be a bit of a downer. Overall though, I’m rather enjoying my experiences with Ruby but not enough that I’d want to use it exclusively. The “Wacky” bit I cite, comes from some of the strange directions the language seems to go and wacky documentation and books available.

We finally are going to get the walls fixed. The plaster in the living room has broken right open (about 4 feet wide), there's lots of other places where the plaster is "bubbling", and the stuff in the bathroom is just rotting away. Anyway, that mean...

I recently went through the painful exercise of configuring Tomcat 5.5 behind Apache 2 using the mod_jk connector. I had done it before with mod_jk2, but it seems that mod_jk2 is deprecated, so I wanted to redo it with the officially supported mod_jk connector. Although I found plenty of tutorials and howtos on Google, they all missed some important details or were not exactly tailored to my situation.

In keeping with the Pragmatic rule of "learn a new programming language once a year," I've spent a fair amount of time learning Ruby over the past two weeks or so. I'm reading Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers\' Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails. Both are very well written books, and I'm [...]

I neglected to mention a useful resource for people following TurboGears somewhat more loosely than our busy mailing list: Planet Turbogears was set up last week by Lee McFadden. That gives you one handy place to go to follow bloggers that talk about TurboGears.

Must Love Zope Found some lovely piece of code deep into the FTP parts of Zope 2 last saturday, one of them is truely ugly. It's listing the contents of the current and parent folders for no apparent reason (or at least, it didn't make sense either to me or Chris McDonough). The code in question is in the manage_FTPstat method of OFS.ObjectManager. Tracing back the source of this code, it seems to have been (surprisingly) introduced by Jim Fulton, back in 1999.

No really, we’re moving to Kansas. I’ve accepted a position at World Online, the online division of the Lawrence Journal-World. I’ll be working on some award winning sites including LJWorld.com, lawrence.com, KUsports.com using my favorite web framework: Django. I’m really excited about working with an awesome team of people doing some really cool stuff.

Nice article, nice reminder about our field.

«MathDOM - Content MathML in Python»

«Client-side HTML form handling.»

«In this post, Christopher introduces you to a few of his favorite features of pydoc Python's tool for generating and viewing source code documentation.»

«Today is your last chance to get in your PyCon 2006 submissions. (If you can't finish an outline today, you can still submit a summary and provide the outline in a few days.)»

«Does zope really have to be hard to learn? We don't think so. We are developing an easy way for medical professionals to create zope web GUI at http://www.medicinebrain.com. The idea is to make zope at least as easy to use as ruby on rails. We are looking for ideas and criticism of the freely available zrails code.»

«An OpenGL 2D graphics library.»

«Generate Oracle functions from PL/SQL embedded in XML.»

«An extensible HTML/XML generator»

«LivingLogic base package: ansistyle, color, make, sispyphus, xpit, url»

«A Pythonic web framework»

«Zope.org Product Updates»

In this blog posting, Seth Gottlieb gives one of the best perspectives I've seen on Goldegg, both the need and the goals. I'm particularly happy that Seth reports on the role of Munwar and CIGNEX in Goldegg, the Plone Foundation, and Plone itself. CIGNEX in general and Munwar in particular have been a constructive force in helping Plone take the next big step.

So there's the current, useful web and the future, hopeful Semantic Web. Apparently the XHTML2 task force is looking at ways to get some value of the latter into the former. Here's one that's an interesting topic for me: CURIEs, which is an attempt to make links and URIs more useful. These two articles show some of the interesting work going on in this area.

This afternoon I took Abigail to a recital to benefit student scholarships for the local piano teachers association. The performer was Dr. Jody Graves, and the program theme was "The Romantic Piano".

Sigh... I've decided that PyDispatcher is probably the right thing for SQLObject events -- I think it's a predictable and easy-to-understand package for this context, and I really prefer phrasing this in terms of events. But PyDispatcher conflicts with RuleDispatch, because they both use the package dispatch.

I've been starting and restarting the next section of the thesis rewrite for an hour or so now. It's such a vast topic, and I really haven't got a good idea of how to present it to someone yet (I really need someone with whom to discuss these things)...

Cool - Ben's company just released Zoomin Maps. It's pretty cool. I mean, the concept's not new any more, but it's great to see someone doing it for New Zealand. Check out these URLs: * http://zoomin.co.nz/map/christchurch+city/christchurch * http://zoomin.co.nz/map/christchurch+city/christchurch/hereford+street It's got maps of ALL of NZ, not just the main centres.

Joey Hess explains how to subscribe to mailing lists with a combined total posts of 2000 or more per day, and live. It's all about pattern recognition.

2005's pumpkins: (more..)

I finally registered for a SourceForge compile farm account. Steven has been reporting failures to build on RedHat, so I figure I need a platform on which to test and debug. Should have it sometime tomorrow.

I was invited back to Thrissur to present a talk to engineering students. Since I didn’t want to give the same ol’ introductory Python talk at the same place, I decided to talk about TurboGears, since that’s been pretty much the only new thing I’ve had time to explore off late. I left in a train on Thursday afternoon, reached Thrissur on Friday morning, left again on Friday evening, and back in Bangalore on Saturday morning, and I had so much fun in-between all that. I have a lot to write about this event and the various talks and demonstrations that were happening. However, Pramode has such a good writeup about Insignia ‘05 that I didn’t feel the need to write about it myself. Also, I don’t have any pictures from this event since I forgot my digicam when I was hurriedly packing to reach the railway station on time. Note: I will be speaking on TurboGears at foss.in/2005.

This is from a person who has got quite a few years under him. As the years pass and musical trends move from one thing to another, I notice what whenever certain songs are listened to... they are still...

I don't understand anything about Paul Harrison's Ghost Diagrams, except that the pictures sure are purty, and it has something to do with tiling. In fact, I don't think I undestand any of Paul's blog, except that it involves many things I am interested in, including math, autism, and math and autism. Dense, but fascinating. BTW: It is nothing more than coincidence that this is the day before Halloween and this entry has the word Ghost in it.

"Sobels, Ogas, and Green Beans [pdf]": "Language as Representations of Violence: the Language Diary of an Aid Worker in Africa". An interesting paper on observations of language made in areas of conflict in (mostly) West Africa. Some of the observations seemed strange to my knowledge of Nige (from uche) "MainPage - Labix": My name is Gustavo Niemeyer, and this is my personal laboratory.

A long time ago I posted about the travails of finding clothing that would fit me. The change of seasons always brings the question, "do I have enough good clothes to wear", which inevitably leads to another round of me being disgruntled about the experience of shopping. Julie dug up some links that have some pretty good ideas for clothing for small men.

I've updated SAM to now include a webserver. This brings along with it a new AJAXy interface (I guess this is sort of a followup to my AJAX post, Alex (dojo) and Bob (mochikit) were the only open source people who responded to my requests for commen

You Passed 8th Grade MathCongratulations, you got 10/10 correct!Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?(thanks Nick!)

Spent much of the the day on the little tasks that have to be done to avoid sliding into chaos and disorder; grocery shopping, house cleaning, that kind of stuff. After that spent a few hours on Kant before the party started. Simon's girlfriend Leigh...

To help promote Susan's book, I signed up for Google Ad words. I thought it was a great program at first. Then Google pissed me off. (more..)

I'm going to release the PyBlosxom contributed plugins pack 1.2.3 for PyBlosxom 1.2 in the next couple of days. So if anyone is sitting on any fixes that need to go on, let me know soon. This has a few fixes here and there--some of which are cosmetic. It also has a behavior fix for the comments plugin so that comments are shown if you have ?showcomments=yes in the querystring as well as when the specific story is viewed.

kravaller i city: [image: "fascists, anti-fascists, anti-anti-fascists (etc)"] "Flaskor, cyklar och andra föremål kastades på demonstrationståget när de gick nedför Drottninggatan mot Lilla torget."

Some interesting discussion topics: FM Transmitters Instantiating an ActiveX component with wxPython Flash Memories Trend Some good stuff to read: Hanging Out continues to grow in popularity among Teens Dan Gilmore: Fueling the Real Estate bubble Eric Sink's take...

From the article "Moving Past Java" an interview with the author of "Beyond Java"... Bruce Tate: Keep in mind that I'm suggesting Java will be dead like COBOL, not dead like Elvis... Madhu Siddalingaiah:I agree with you that innovations are beginning to appear outside of Java. Don't worry. Madhu will kind of correct himself in just a few paragraphs... Madhu Siddalingaiah: Ruby is a dynamic language, but there are many others, such as LISP and Smalltalk. Are there lessons we can learn from the one of oldest and one of the most innovative of languages? Bruce Tate: Sure.

Four and a half days later, I now have power, phone, and DSL again. Hurricane Wilma hit us with unexpected force, leaving millions of people without electricity - even now. The estimates they've been giving on the news say that for most of Palm Beach County it could take several weeks more before power is restored.

(original post) "JavaScript, as a language, gives you just about nothing useful. All you have are objects (little more than key-value bags, or null), extremely lame exception handling, and a few primitives (number, string, undefined, function). ...

Should you need it In some far off future Though I cannot imagine why I will instruct you here Though I suggest you never try To drop from joyous mania Leaping through life Peace and hope in all you say Loving each face on the street Smiling at all y...

To some Python users this is old-school old-news stuff but since I've never used it before I found it worth mentioning. ... [168 words]

Reading the original outline I realised that my definition so far left off a number of key points. So, tack this onto the end (it feels tacked on when you read the whole thing through, will have to edit them into something a little less jarring): Wha...

We're pleased to welcome our new Sales Manager Sandra Harvey. Sandra joins us from The Scotsman Publications, and has already hit the ground running this week talking to prospective MailManager customers.> >To mark the occaision, RichardX shot some new team photos this morning, and we've put them up on the team page over on our main site. So, now you know what we all look like.

Edit or create ~/.gnomerc and add "export WINDOW_MANAGER=sawfish" (or whatever) to it. Apparently Gnome 2.12 (and hence Ubuntu Breezy) decided to stop supporting the /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager entry in gconf. The key says "This key has been deprecated since GNOME 2.12", but what they mean is "broken", not "deprecated" (from what I can tell). It took me a while to figure this out, so I'm posting it with the intention that google will pick up on it and help other hapless non-metacity users.

This bug day was announced on short notice, we we still managed to kill 26 bugs (while 9 new were opened). That's good work! Because there are still 84 active tickets for CPS 3.4 (some are only details of course), we've decided to release a CPS 3.3.7 in the meantime, probably early next week. And we'll keep doing bug days, I propose to have them every Thursday until CPS 3.4 is finally released.

On the first night of Foo Camp this past summer, I was wandering. Julie had decided to go to sleep, since she was talking the next morning. Night owl that I am, I was in no way prepared to go to sleep.

generated on Tue 01 of Nov, 2005 at 01:32:13 PM in Melbourne, Australia

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