Hex dump

I am speaking at PyCon AU 2011 about CouchDB

2011-07-14T10:40:00.002+10:00

The official schedule for PyCon Australia 2011 has been announced (http://pycon-au.org/2011/conference/schedule/). My talk is the first session after the opening keynote and will be an overview of CouchDB and how you can use it with Python. "CouchDB (http://couchdb.apache.org/) is an open source, document-oriented NoSQL Database Management Server.It supports queries via views using MapReduce,

Python Informix Database Connection Options

2011-05-19T01:58:00.000+10:00

I am currently at the International Informix Users Group Conference (http://www.iiug.org/index.php) in Kansas. In the opening keynote by Jerry Keesee, there some discussion about IBM's Open Source Initiatives for Informix. On the accompanying slide, Python and Django were listed. This reminded me that I hadn't taken stock of what the Informix DB connections options were for the Python user lately

I finally own a smartphone, and it's not an iPhone

2011-01-22T18:58:00.005+11:00

After years of being an outcast amongst my colleagues, happy with a simple mobile phone that just made phone calls, I made the decision to upgrade to a smartphone. Why would I, since I was actually happy with my "no frills" Nokia and it's excellent battery life which makes a smartphone look retarded. At work we are working on making our web applications more mobile friendly, so we needed a range

SyPy Meetup - CoffeeScript & Test Driven Development

2010-09-03T13:47:00.003+10:00

Last night was the September gathering of the Sydney Python Users Group. The meeting started with a lightning talk about CoffeeScript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/) which is a little language that compiles into Javascript. CoffeeScript borrows some of it's syntax from Ruby, Haml and Python. The javascript it generates uses only the good parts.Then Vaughan Allan (@vornstar) gave a

Malaysian Open Source Conference 2010

2010-06-17T14:32:00.004+10:00

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from June 29 - July 1 there will be the second Malaysian Open Source Conference. This conference is organised and run by OSDC.my. The conference has three tracks:Business - Presentations to introduce Government and Business to Open Source.Developer - Modelled on OSDC, presentations by Open Source developers for developers.Community - Presentations for users of Open

MSC Malaysia OSCONF 2009

2009-05-12T15:57:00.006+10:00

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from May 31 - June 3 there will be the inaugural MSC Malaysia OSCONF. This conference is designed to bring together Government, Business, Open Source Developer and User communities to showcase and expand Open Source's contribution to the IT industry and socio-economy. The conference program consists of a one day hackathon, followed by the three day main conference. The

OSDC 2008 Earlybird Registration is now open!

2008-09-30T21:46:00.003+10:00

Earlybird Registration for The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is now open.OSDC 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a rangeof operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. This

OSDC 2008 - Sydney - Call for Papers

2008-05-15T22:35:00.007+10:00

The Open Source Developers' Conference 2008 is a conference run by open source developers, for developers and business people. It covers numerous programming languages across a range of operating systems, and related topics such as business processes, licensing, and strategy. Talks vary from introductory pieces through to the deeply technical. It is a great opportunity to meet, share, and learn

Silverlight 2 SDK, Mac OS X and Mono

2008-03-07T23:15:00.004+11:00

John Lam has posted two introductory articles [1],[2] that use the Dynamic Silverlight SDK . It came as no surprise that only Microsoft operating systems are officially supported for the SDK. So after downloading and installing it onto a VMWare image running one of the supported operating systems, I decided to try installing it on my Macbook Pro. I copied the SDK directory structure across,

Google Code SVN interface improvements

2008-02-04T10:08:00.000+11:00

I use Google Code Project Hosting for a number of my open source projects. It gave me a common place to store my code under subversion and the integrated wiki allowed easy creation of on-line documentation. The web interface to subversion was rather limited only showing the current version of the repository. So I have tended to use the subversion tools on my computer for viewing revisions etc. In

My OSDC 2007 talks

2007-11-28T16:17:00.000+11:00

Today I gave my two talks at OSDC. This morning I gave a talk on web testing using twill and selenium remote control. A pdf of the slides can be downloaded:Testing Web Applications with Scripting LanguagesAnd this afternoon I spoke about Moonlight, the Mono implementation of Silverlight.Moonlight - Shiny, Pretty Things with XML?I had intended to blog about the various OSDC sessions I have

A sneak peek at mod_wsgi 1.2

2007-10-31T02:39:00.000+11:00

Errata: Opps, the title should be "A sneak peek at mod_wsgi 2.0"Today Graham Dumpleton announced the first release candidate of mod_wsgi 2.0. mod_wsgi is a simple to use Apache module which can host any Python application which supports the Python WSGI interface. The new features added are:'Process' option for WSGIReloadMechanism to make it easier to restart an application running in a mod_wsgi

November 28, a busy day for me

2007-10-10T15:16:00.000+10:00

Just been notified by the OSDC 2007 Program Committee that my two presentations are on the same day. 11:00-11:30 Testing Web Applications with Scripting Languages14:30-15:00 Moonlight - Shiny, Pretty Things with XML?The complete conference program can be viewed here. So if you want to spend an interesting 3-4 days in Brisbane mixing with open source developers,

Version 1.0 of mod_wsgi is now available

2007-09-06T10:23:00.000+10:00

Graham Dumpleton announced on the mod_wsgi mailing list yesterday:"Okay folks, official 1.0 release of mod_wsgi is now available fromhttp://www.modwsgi.org.The only difference between this version and mod_wsgi-1.0c4 is theversion string and some minor changes in README file.Now that this is out of the way, I'll be able to get onto implementingall the nice new features I want to add to make it

mod_wsgi 1.0 Release Candiate Available

2007-07-26T09:36:00.000+10:00

Today Graham Dumpleton tagged the SVN and has made available the release candidate of mod_wsgi. The mod_wsgi adapter is an Apache module that provides a WSGI compliant interface for hosting Python 2.3+ Python based web applications under Apache. Graham has written it completely in C code so it has a lower overhead than the mod_python or CGI adapters. It can be used with Apache 1.3, 2.0 or 2.2 and

IronRuby Pre Alpha Source Code Released

2007-07-23T22:51:00.000+10:00

Today John Lam announced the first release of IronRuby source code. Of interest to me in the announcement was the following quote:"We're also happy to announce that we will be accepting source code contributions into the IronRuby libraries."This policy is what many users of IronPython have been wanting since it's first release. Since both language implementations are released under the same

Sydney traffic chaos disrupts SyPy meeting

2007-07-06T18:28:00.000+10:00

Update: It would appear the Nine News website doesn't have permanent urls so removed their link. Try this one for more background.Yesterday I hosted the July SyPy meetup at my work. Since the office is North Sydney based, many pythoneers would need to travel to the meeting using Sydney's rail network. It doesn't have the best record for reliability, and yesterday was a classic example. A panel

Submitted a talk proposal for OSDC 2007

2007-06-27T11:29:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I submitted my talk proposal for OSDC. If accepted, the talk will be about web testing using scripting languages.The submission deadline for proposals is 30 June, so why not submit one as well. So in no particular order, Alan, Keith or Ben take this as me rattling your cages.

Google Developer Day tomorrow but not in Malaysia

2007-05-30T22:31:00.003+10:00

Tomorrow is Google Developer Day and if I was in my normal country of residence I would be attending. But since I have been working in Malaysia for the last week, I will just have to wait for the Google videos. Very interested in the GData stuff as I have been working on some things with the Google Spreadsheet Data API. Expect some blog posts about it soon.

OSDC 2007 Call For Papers

2007-05-12T20:30:00.000+10:00

This year's Open Source Developers Conference will be in Brisbane at the Royal on the Park Hotel (opposite the City Botanical Gardens). On their website I see that the "Call For Papers" is now open.The key dates are:Submission deadline 30th June 2007Proposal acceptance 31st July 2007Submission deadline 31st August 2007 OSDC 2007 Tutorials 26th November 2007OSDC 2007 Conference

A new computer for work

2007-05-04T15:47:00.000+10:00

I am writing this post with my new MacBook Pro (2.3GHz Core 2/2Gb DDR/120Gb SATA). Alan, Andy and Graham, I know I said I didn't want one but thanks to BootCamp and rEFIt, it certainly runs my favorite OS well. And I admit Mac OS X is proving to be a pleasant experience. You can quiz me why I changed my mind at the next SyPy meeting.

When I programmed in 6809 assembler

2007-05-02T20:38:00.000+10:00

I have been asked how could I have programmed in 6809 assembler since a ZX-81 computer used the Zilog/NEC Z80 CPU. So to clarify things, I only ever programmed in BASIC on the ZX-81, but in the mid eighties I had a job designing and programming realtime controllers for fruit grading and handling machinery. These controllers used the 6809 processor. It was a very interesting and challenging job.

Mono and the Dynamic Language Runtime

2007-05-01T22:52:00.000+10:00

In my post about the IronPython 2.0 Alpha release, I wondered how the mono team would implement or support DLR. The answer appeared in this post by Miguel de Icaza"The release for the DLR is done under the terms of the Microsoft Permissive License (MsPL) which is by all means an open source license. This means that we can use and distribute the DLR as part of Mono without having to build it from

Dynamic Language Runtime Source Code

2007-05-01T12:21:00.000+10:00

In my previous post I said I was unsure what license Microsoft's DLR was released under. But in this blog post from Jim Hugunin, I discovered it is released under the same license as IronPython 2.0 - the BSD-style Microsoft Permissive License. This means there is access to the source code for DLR. Currently the DLR source is shipped with source code distribution of IronPython 2.0 Alpha 1.

IronPython 2.0 Alpha 1 Released

2007-05-01T10:55:00.000+10:00

Microsoft has just released the first alpha of IronPython 2.0. This version of IronPython is built on top of the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) which is a shared runtime for dynamic languages on CLI. One of the goals of DLR is to allow different dynamic languages to share library code, so in theory and the future my IronPython code would be able to access code in a IronRuby gem. The DLR is

Last nights Sydney Python Group Meetup

2007-04-06T10:29:00.000+10:00

Last night was the monthly SyPy meetup. Thanks to generosity of Google the venue was the Fraser meeting room at the Sydney Googleplex. It was a great turnout of Sydney Pythoneers with 30+ attending.First Alec Thomas gave a talk about PyCon 2007 and what he felt were the 10 best talks he attended. Alec's presentation can be found here. Then Andrew Bennetts gave a talk about the Bazaar GPL

PyCon Envy

2007-02-26T15:44:00.000+11:00

I am jealous! I want to be at PyCon 2007 and reading the few blog posts (I think everyone there is having too good a time to blog) makes me want to be there even more. Hopefully the video and audio will be uploaded soon. Guess I will just have to save, convince the "better half" it's for the good of the family and make it to PyCon 2008. Alec Thomas will be giving a debrief on his time at PyCon

IronPython 1.1 Beta 1 Released

2007-02-22T10:26:00.000+11:00

Just in time for PyCon 2007, Dino Viehland of the IronPython Dev Team announced the release of the first IronPython 1.1 Beta.This release primarily focuses on adding the remaining new functionality for the 1.1 release (array module, importing pre-compiled modules) along with many new bug fixes. Also included but previously available with 1.1 Alpha 1 are the new XML Doc comment integration

OSDC 2007 will be in Brisbane

2007-02-21T22:57:00.000+11:00

Arjen Lentz announced today that Brisbane will be the host city for this years OSDC. Time to start thinking about possible paper topics again.UpdateThanks for reminding me Keith. Once the actual conference venue is announced, we will also need to find a venue for the nightly Beer BOF's.

FePy now shipped with Mono 1.2.3

2007-02-10T08:33:00.000+11:00

From the Mono 1.2.3 release notes:"In this release, we are now shipping the IronPython Community Edition (IPCE) from Seo Sanghyeon. IPCE includes a number of preconfigured libraries with IronPython to improve your IronPython developing experience."This is release 5 of IPCE but Sanghyeon continues to improve it and the latest can be checked out from IPCE repository.

Blog of Note?

2007-02-10T08:00:00.000+11:00

Today this blog is Bloggers "Blog of Note". Well that explains the abnormal traffic statistics.

mod_wsgi Performance

2007-02-03T19:38:00.000+11:00

Graham Dumpleton has published his benchmarks for mod_wsgi.

mod_wsgi - simple and fast apache wsgi serving

2007-02-02T10:39:00.000+11:00

There are a many ways to serve a WSGI application via Apache with FastCGI appearing to be the favorite. If you have to support many diverse operating systems running different versions of Apache, serving a WSGI application via CGI is a guaranteed but not fast deployment method. You may be wondering why I haven't suggested the WSGI mod_python adaptor as a solution. I am sure it is a workable

SyPy Social Meetup

2007-02-02T10:11:00.000+11:00

Last night was the second meeting of the Sydney Python Users Group for 2007 and we had a good turnout.There was a wide range of topics discussed including:Unit TestingSoftware DeploymentDistributed Version ControlApache and WSGI - more about this in another postSo if you are in the Sydney and are interested these types of topics, why not join us the first Thursday of each month. Details of the

LCA 2007 My Day 3

2007-01-20T21:38:00.000+11:00

Yesterday was the last day of linux conf au. As usual it was the mad rush from work to get to my first session, at least this time I wasn't late. The session was Robert McQueen's "Telepathy - Unifying IM, Voice and Video Communications". This was very interesting and after seeing the video demo using a Nokia N800, apart from wanting one, I will be keeping an eye of this project.The next was Andre

IronPython and Traceback line numbers in Mono (workaround)

2007-01-20T08:25:00.000+11:00

One of the reasons why I need to have access to a Windows dev environment when doing my IronPython/Mono development is the lack of line numbers in IronPython tracebacks under Mono. But via Seo Sanghyeon comes a workround. He has discovered that that Mono can't display line numbers from AssemblyBuilder built in memory, but only from Assembly loaded from disk. So you need run mono in debug mode and

LCA 2007 My Day 2

2007-01-18T20:19:00.000+11:00

Today was day 4 of linux conf au, and my second day of attendance.My first session today was Peter Miller, Erik de Castro Lopo, and Robert Collins tutorial "The Hao of testing". Since I have been to work before heading to the conference, I arrived at the tutorial a couple of minutes late to discover there had been homework. So a mad rush to get connected, gmp downloaded and built. Then I needed

LCA 2007 My Day 1

2007-01-17T21:22:00.000+11:00

Today was day 3 of linux conf au, but it was the first day I attended and only got there just before 2pm. As I wanted to hear Michael Carden's talk on Digital Preservation, I headed to the lecture room where it was scheduled. As I was one session early, I listened to Rafael Espindola's talk - The ARM backend of LLVM.Then it was Michael's talk - Digital Preservation - The National Archives of

Need to find time for LCA 2007

2007-01-15T22:32:00.000+11:00

Linux conf 2007 is on this week and I have paid to attend. The only problem will be finding time to go, otherwise it will be the most expensive t-shirt I have ever purchased. The urge to attend LCA was induced while attending OSDC 2006 and meeting a number of interesting people who are speaking at LCA. So hopefully will be able to attend:Digital Preservation - The National Archives of Australia,

My OSDC 2006 Paper

2006-12-21T23:08:00.000+11:00

At this years OSDC, I did a presentation titled Development of Mono Applications with Agile Languages. The agile languages I discussed were Boo and IronPython. I have presented at the last three OSDC's and this years topic generated the most feedback and post presentation discussion for me. The paper published in the proceedings can be downloaded from here.

ISAPI WSGI SVN has moved

2006-12-21T22:44:00.000+11:00

Due to heavy ticket spam on the old SVN site http://isapi-wsgi.python-hosting.com, it would appear that the isapi-wsgi site has been taken off-line. A couple of months ago I started mirroring the SVN at http://isapi-wsgi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ so access to the source code is still available. Thank goodness for backups.

Is Linux ready for Inflight Entertainment?

2006-12-12T08:36:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I flew to Malaysia on a MAS 747. It is a 8+ hour flight, but the plane has the individual movie/game consoles in the back of the seat headrest to allow me to catch up on all the movies I normally would never get to see. The only problem was that every 40-50 minutes, my console crashed. Not with the "blue screen of death", but with a Tux image and a crash trace. A few minutes later it

More Blogger Beta Woes

2006-12-04T22:57:00.000+11:00

Now the compose mode in browser editor has disappeared when creating and editting posts. You only understand how useful something is when it is taken away.Also the Atom feed generation seems to continue to randomly decide I have modified posts that I haven't. The joys of beta software.

OSDC 2006 Starts on Wednesday

2006-12-04T22:38:00.000+11:00

Flying down to Melbourne tomorrow for OSDC 2006. The program is looking very good and I am sure the topics will be mind expanding. My talk on Mono, Boo and IronPython is midday on the second day of the conference. Based on my experience at the last two OSDC conferences, I have to agree with Andy Todd's statement:"I expect OSDC this year like last will be full of smart people sharing great ideas,

IronPython and trace style debugging

2006-11-23T23:10:00.001+11:00

When developing with IronPython under Windows, there is excellent debugger support via Visual Studio. But sometimes you just want to do simple trace style debugging, in other words, put some print statements in your code. This works well when developing an application you can run under the console but is problematic if the application is a service or ASP.NET handler. When developing similar

Microsoft Release FastCGI Technical Preview

2006-11-02T17:25:00.000+11:00

To allow PHP to perform better with IIS, Microsoft have released a FastCGI component for IIS. Why is this good for Python Web apps? Many support FastCGI and if your web app/framework is WSGI compliant you can use flup. So we finally have Microsoft "blessed" way to get our Python apps to run behind IIS.

Roundup and WSGI

2006-10-31T15:17:00.000+11:00

In a previous post I mentioned that I had an adaptor to run the Roundup Issue Tracker as a WSGI application. I never actually published the location of the code. So if you want to have a play, it can be found here. There are also 2 example ini files for using the adaptor with Paste.DeployCurrently there is one unresolved issue: when using Roundup's internal authentication, after login the browser

IronPython and ADO.NET Part 2

2006-10-28T17:54:00.000+10:00

This is the second in a series of posts about database access with IronPython and ADO.NET. This post will discuss connecting to the database and executing basic DDL and SQL statements via the Python DB-API instead of directly accessing ADO.Net. So that the examples can run on Windows and non Windows systems, they will support either SQLite3 via the Mono.Data.SQLiteCilent ADO provider or Microsoft

IronPython Community Edition R3 Released.

2006-10-27T06:49:00.000+10:00

Yesterday Seo Sanghyeon announced that the third release of IPCE was available. This release uses the current IronPython stable version 1.0.1 and the modules of the CPython 2.4.4 standard library that are known to work under IronPython. Also Sanghyeon has been busy creating additional CPython-compatible wrappers which are included with this release:zlib, using System.IO.Compression.hashlib, using

Atom Publishing Server using WSGI

2006-10-18T18:31:00.000+10:00

On XML.com "Joe Gregorio's latest Restful Web column implements the Atom Publishing Protocol as a Python web service using WSGI." Only discovered this today, hopefully the second part will be coming soon. Joe also has some other interesting wsgi related posts on his blogWSGI CollectionsJSON Server

Adding .pth file support to IronPython

2006-10-14T22:37:00.000+10:00

In a blog post I read, there was the following statement:'Damnit. Apparently IronPython doesn’t support .pth files. I’m not sure if I should expect this or not from a “1.0” product, but it’s sure annoying since it seems most libraries use them.'For me, it is an issue due the fact that many of the libraries I want to use come as Python Eggs, and the easy-install.pth file is required if you want

Now running on Blogger Beta

2006-10-08T15:01:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I moved this blog to run under the Blogger Beta. I had been running a test blog under it for the last month, and had suffered no show stopping issues. So made the decision to move yesterday and are now regretting it. The one thing I didn't test was the Atom feed with the various feed readers that subscribe to my blog. It would appear that pyblagg (the site most of my readers come via)

Using IronPython's 1.0.1 new community written built-in module support

2006-10-08T08:17:00.000+10:00

In a previous post I mentioned the community written built-in modules support provided with IronPython 1.0.1. I remembered that Kevin Chu had posted a C# replacement for the CPython md5 library on the mailing list for inclusion in the IronPython core. His code is a perfect candiate for using the new external module loading support. So if you compile the code below as a library assemblyusing

Latest IronPython Releases

2006-10-06T12:36:00.000+10:00

IronPython 1.0.1 releasedIronPython 1.0.1 was released today. Apart from some minor bug fixes, it includes a new feature described in the release email as follows:"The new support for community written built-in modules enables loading the .NET DLLs on startup and adding them to the built-in module list. This feature was implemented by updating site.py to check for a "DLLs" directory and looking

Deploying the GDATA Reader as an executable revisited

2006-09-19T23:11:00.000+10:00

In a previous post, I described how to create an executable with IronPython and provided a simple script to do it. I see that the IronPython team have released their own script Pyc to do the job. It can be found on the IronPython samples page.

IronPython1.0 Final Released Today

2006-09-06T06:53:00.000+10:00

Jim Hugunin announced today that the Microsoft Dynamic Languages team have released IronPython 1.0. The release includes some new samples as well.Thanks to Jim and his team for a great product. I never thought I would say this, thanks Microsoft ;-)

IronPython and ADO.NET Part 1

2006-09-05T14:51:00.000+10:00

This is the first in a series of posts about database access with IronPython and ADO.NET. This post will discuss connecting to the database and executing basic DDL and SQL statements. So that the examples can run on Windows and non Windows systems, they will support either SQLite3 via the Mono.Data.SQLiteCilent ADO provider or Microsoft Access via the System.Data.Odbc provider.Firstly we need

Serving a Pylons App with ISAPI-WSGI

2006-09-02T21:28:00.000+10:00

David Primmer has put together a great how-to on running a Pylons app with ISAPI-WSGIhttp://pylonshq.com/project/pylonshq/wiki/ServePylonsWithIISAnd since Pylons uses Paste, it is a good how-to for running any Paste app under IIS.And just out of interest, is anyone other than David and myself using isapi-wsgi?

Django with an IBM Informix backend

2006-08-29T13:25:00.001+10:00

Update: This version of the django informix backend only works with Django pre 1.0 due to changes in Django database api. I have created a version that is known to work with Django 1.1+ and it's code can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/django-informix/At work I needed to quickly be able to publish some technical bulletins on the web and provide a web interface for addition of new content.

IronPython 1.0 RC2 released

2006-08-17T16:39:00.000+10:00

The Dynamic Languages team at Microsoft today released IronPython 1.0 RC2. I know what I will be testing for the next couple of nights. If no major issues found, looks like a final release in 2 weeks.

Deploying the GDATA Reader as an executable

2006-08-14T17:27:00.000+10:00

Now that we have a working GDATA reader, it would be nice to make it into a CLI executable. IronPython provides a couple of ways to do this. The IronPython console application ipy.exe has an extension switch called SaveAssemblies. This will save the main Python script and any imported Python file as separate executables of the same basename. This is good if you have a simple single Python program

A Windows.Forms GUI for the GDATA Reader using IronPython

2006-08-12T20:42:00.000+10:00

This is the second coding entry in a series of posts about using IronPython to develop a GDATA reader.The purpose of this post is show how to add a GUI to the simple GDATA reader IronPython script I created in a previous post using System.Windows.Forms. It will not be an in depth discussion on how things work within Windows Forms. For a more detailed introduction to Windows Forms and IronPython,

My OSDC 2006 Paper Proposal Accepted

2006-08-11T13:10:00.000+10:00

My paper proposal "Development of Mono Applications with Agile Languages" has been accepted for this years Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne. There are 15 proposals for the Python stream, and lots of others. The accepted proposals for the conference can be viewed here. Great to see that Alan and Andy will be presenting as well.So if you are into Open Source, want to spend time with

My CLI and IronPython Development Environment

2006-08-11T13:04:00.000+10:00

Someone asked me what my preferred development environment for doing CLI and IronPython work is. Since I want to use IronPython to develop cross-platform apps, my operating system is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Linux running Mono 1.1.16.1. I normally have a couple of versions of IronPython installed, as of today it is 1.0 beta 9 and RC1. For editting I alternate between Vim 6.4 and the MonoDevelop 0.11

Agile investigation of the GDATA client with IronPython

2006-08-01T17:56:00.000+10:00

Updated 13 May 2007 - Modified for new location and packaging of GData libraries.This is the first coding entry in a series of posts about using IronPython to develop a GDATA reader. You will need to have IronPython RC1 or better installed, and either .NET 2.0 or Mono 1.1.16.1+ installed.Download the Google GDATA client and unarchive the contents.Find Google.GData.Client.dll and copy it to the

Confessions of a part-time IronPython programmer

2006-08-01T11:30:00.000+10:00

On the 27 july 2006 I gave a talk to the the Sydney Python Group (SyPy) about my experiences using IronPython on both .NET and Mono. I promised some people who couldn't attend that I would do a post on my blog that presented the same material. I have decided to present this material as a series of posts, with this post being the index to them.Index of postsAgile investigation of the GDATA client

IronPython 1.0 RC1 released

2006-07-26T13:11:00.000+10:00

It was announced on the IronPython mailinglist today, that the first release candiate of IronPython 1.0 is available for download. IronPython is an implementation of Python written in C# and designed to run on an implementation of CLI like Microsoft .NET 2.0 CLR or Mono 1.1.16.1+. The goal of the IronPython team is for 1.0 is to be compatible with CPython 2.4. But they have included some features

Overriding IronPython's built-in modules

2006-07-18T18:43:00.000+10:00

For those who haven't used IronPython, batteries are not included. After installing IronPython, you need to copy, symbolic link or update sys.path with the CPython standard libs if you want to do more than script .NET/Mono classes. As the various beta's of IronPython have been released, some of the standard library modules are being coded in C# and included in the IronPython Assembly. The socket

SyPy Meetup Reminder Thursday 27 July

2006-07-18T10:33:00.000+10:00

The Sydney Python group is having its first meeting for the year on Thursday July 27.Usual time and new place:Thursday, July 27, 2006 (6:30 PM - 8:30 PM)The "new" University of Sydney School of IT Building.Thanks to Bob Kummerfeld for arranging this.The venue is approx 1 km from both Central and Redfern stations.Use the entrance from the University side, not the Cleveland St side. If you come

IronPython and the moving API

2006-07-17T15:52:00.000+10:00

Last week the IronPython team released IronPython .0 beta 9. This should be the last beta before the release candiate. Also they say they have finally locked down the Hosting API. This has an impact on what I have been working on, which involves hosting the interpreter within an ASP.NET handler. Thankfully the final Hosting API has returned to a more pythonic API rather than imho, the ugly

What does the World Cup Football and OSDC 2006 have in common?

2006-07-10T10:39:00.000+10:00

While watching the second half of today's final as Italy and France played towards a penalty shootout, I made the most of my time and submitted my paper proposal for OSDC 2006. If it is accepted I will be speaking about using Agile Languages in this case, IronPython and Boo with Mono.Alan Green has submitted one, now just need Andy Todd to submit one, and the gang of 3 could be all speaking at

Another weblog to maintain

2006-07-08T21:46:00.000+10:00

To not pollute this blog's Atom feed with too much detail on my CLI adventures, I have created a new blog.Now if blogger had category filters, I wouldn't have to do this. Of course, I could stop mucking around and get a domain name, find a web host and do my own.

CLI - a journey of discovery

2006-06-30T06:34:00.000+10:00

My open source interest has been focused on CLI for the last month, not the Command Line Interface but the Common Language Infrastructure. Thanks to mono there are tools to develop cross platform, cross language applications. As I am discovering the reality is a little different. So expect a few entries in this blog documenting the challenges, disappointments and victories as my journey of

Today I am an Australian

2006-06-30T06:12:00.000+10:00

After living in Australia for the last 7 years, marrying an Australian, and creating a new little Australian, last night with 80 others, I attended my Australian citizenship ceremony. So another phase in my life begins.

OSDC 2006 Call for Papers

2006-05-29T22:54:00.000+10:00

The Open Source Developers Conference is happening again this December in Melbourne, Australia. The last two conferences were excellent. Of course what makes a great conference is the people that attend and the content. The Call for Papers is now on.I hope to attend this year but not sure if I will submit a paper proposal.

SQLAlchemy, more than an ORM

2006-04-16T22:23:00.000+10:00

I remember seeing references to Michael Bayers' SQLAlchemy and thinking yet another Python ORM to look at sometime in the future. I have used SQLObject for various hobby projects, but since I deal with legacy databases (some database schema's just do not map well to an ORM) at the day job, I have tended to use SQL and the Python DBI for my database access work. Part of my job is to evaluate

Pylons - another great tool for my programming toolkit

2006-04-14T20:49:00.000+10:00

In a previous post I mentioned that I had been looking at Pylons, a WSGI enabled web framework and had a project that would be a good fit. Finally have found some time to start work on it and my experiences with Pylons so far have been good. I picked Pylons for a number of reasons:WSGI enabledUses PasteNot aligned with any particular ORMSupport of different template packages via BuffetReasonable

Getting ISAPI-WSGI from Subversion Repository

2006-02-25T10:00:00.000+11:00

Had an anonymous email asking how to check-out isapi-wsgi from subversion. The following command will do it:svn co http://svn.isapi-wsgi.python-hosting.com/trunk

Hex Dump Tools written in Python

2006-02-23T17:03:00.000+11:00

In reviewing my blog access stats, it would appear that most used search engine keyword combination that sends visitors to my site are "hex" and "dump". So to not disappoint these 20% of visitors, I have tracked down a number of hex dumping tools written in my favorite programming language.READBIN by Tony Dycks is a Text Console-based program which reads a single Input File specified on the

What's been happening in the world of WSGI

2006-02-02T16:24:00.000+11:00

Good to see some activity in the development of WSGI component based microframeworks.I have been following Ben Bangert and James Gardners' work on Pylons which is based on Myghty, with a custom Resolver, full Paste and WSGI integration. Haven't had a play with it yet, but have an idea for a project where Pylons may be the perfect fit. Also Julian Krause has just released RhubarbTart, a light

The Year in Review

2006-01-22T20:36:00.000+11:00

Tomorrow my blog is one year old. So thought it was time to review it's value. In the last year I have made 44 posts, not quite once a week based on the math. But truthfully, I appear to blog in bursts directly related to when I am doing open source stuff. And since any open source work can only be done in my free time, which is hard to find as I try to balance life between work and family, there

Why is the PC running so slow?

2006-01-08T14:24:00.000+11:00

At work we created a new VMWare image of the latest release of our Financial Software. Since it was required for a demo at our KL office, we needed to compress it prior to sending over the Internet to them. Since it was over 4GB, we used WinRAR to compress each virtual disk. It took forever and transferring via scp was just as bad. The cpu was the bottleneck, not because of the compression but

Merry Christmas

2005-12-16T10:18:00.000+11:00

Heading off on computer free Christmas holidays tomorrow. Back to my homeland of New Zealand and looking forward to crayfish and beef on a spit for Christmas dinner. So just wanted to post a greeting now. Thanks to all the people who have read my blog, the members of the open source community who have helped me and have provided feedback. To those who celebrate Christmas, have a great one with

Recharged after OSDC

2005-12-16T09:09:00.000+11:00

After attending OSDC last week, I came back energised and wanting to get some more open source stuff done.So apart from getting Roundup to work with WSGI, I have been busy integrating a newly released version of informixdb into the Zope Informix DA and SQLObject. Informix is our development database at work and for any *ix Python DBI access we have been using mxODCBC as the previous release of

OSDC 2005 - My WSGI Talk Errata

2005-12-10T01:14:00.000+11:00

I have updated the copy of the paper to include more info on using paste.deploy pipelines. This info was presented at the conference but wasn't part of my submitted paper due to time constraints.

OSDC 2005 - My WSGI talk

2005-12-08T15:35:00.000+11:00

Due to lack of an Internet connection during the conference (my issue not OSDC's), I have not had a chance to post anything about the conference until now. On Monday 5 December I gave my talk on WSGI. Not really sure how it went across as no one asked any questions at the end or really talked to me about it during the rest of the conference. Of course maybe it was so good, everyone now fully

Deploying ViewCVS with WSGI

2005-11-22T11:12:00.000+11:00

In my continuing expermentation with Python Paste I came across the cgiapp module. The module provides a class that acts as a proxy to an existing CGI script, which means you can take an existing CGI script and run it using a WSGI enabled server. Rather than testing it's functionality with a simple cgi script, decided to see if I could run ViewCVS with it. To get it to run was very simple.Create

SyPy Meetup Last Night

2005-11-18T09:53:00.000+11:00

Last night was the last meeting of the year for the Sydney Python group. Andy Todd did a test run of his OSDC presentation on PythonCard. Apart from having to cope with using a Windows laptop instead of his beloved iBook, it was very interesting introduction in how to use PythonCard. I gave a presentation on Python Paste and hopefully, a few more know now what it is. The discussion on

Deploying a WSGI app with Python Paste

2005-11-15T17:38:00.000+11:00

As part of my research of the current state of WSGI for my paper for OSDC2005 I revisited PythonPaste. Ian has added lots more functionality since I last looked and I wanted to use Python Paste as the "glue" for a demo of creating a web app from WSGI middleware components. As with most stuff Ian does, there was enough documentation to get me going or so I thought. In reality, it took me a lot

OSDC Proposal Outline

2005-09-23T16:29:00.000+10:00

It would appear that you need a login to view my proposal. So here is a copy.WSGI - Gateway or Glue?Short Description: Present a review of where WSGI currently is and describe/show how it is being used to create a framework-neutral set of components.Stream: Python30 minute Paper Presentation in EnglishAbstractThe Web Service Gateway Interface is an API defined in PEP 333 that allows web servers

OSDC Proposal Accepted

2005-09-16T10:41:00.000+10:00

"Your proposal has now been reviewed, and I am pleased to be able to inform you that it has been accepted for inclusion in the conference program" so it is now time for me to gather together all the ideas that have flowing around in my head and create a coherent paper from them. The proposal description can be found at http://osdc2005.cgpublisher.com/proposals/24After looking at the other

Argh, having to learn java again

2005-08-28T20:03:00.000+10:00

After managing to keep myself employed for almost the last decade without having to program in Java, a project at work means that the end is nigh. Pulled the "Teach yourself Java in 21 days" out of storage and noted that it was published in 1996. So Java and I have kept our distance for a long time. Also means I need to get myself up to speed with what has happened to Java over the period. In the

OSDC Proposal Submitted

2005-08-20T16:54:00.000+10:00

Due to the "massive" response from my readers (thanks Richard) I went with WSGI and submitted a proposal. As of last night, it looks like they have 55 proposals of a wide and interesting range of topics. It would also appear there are more Python than Perl proposals, but I had my rose coloured glasses on, so I may be mistaken.

Goodbye Windows, Welcome Linux to my home

2005-08-14T14:45:00.000+10:00

At work I use Windows XP as my workstation because that's what our clients use to run our frontend. Most of our development work is done on servers running Linux and truthfully the most used program on my XP box is ssh. But at home, I have always run a Microsoft OS. Of late, I have been questioning why. The home machine is used for paying the bills via the Internet, reading email, browsing the

Database design for newbies

2005-08-13T20:34:00.000+10:00

Found this whitepaper on database design by Ian Bicking & Brian Moloney. A good explanation of Dr Codd's rules but in a language a newbie could understand.

How fast a year goes by, OSDC decisions again...

2005-08-13T16:42:00.000+10:00

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was considering presenting a paper at OSDC 2004. But I did, and here we are a year later in the same situation. I really enjoyed last year's conference, both giving my presentation, meeting many interesting people, and deep discussions over many beers each night. I want to submit a proposal for a paper but still haven't decided what I want to talk about.

Creating an ODBC data source using Python

2005-05-21T20:47:00.000+10:00

For the cross-platform installer I am creating, I need to create ODBC data sources for Windows installations. Thanks to the Python ctypes module the solution was as simple as:import ctypesODBC_ADD_DSN = 1 # Add data sourceODBC_CONFIG_DSN = 2 # Configure (edit) data sourceODBC_REMOVE_DSN = 3 # Remove data sourceODBC_ADD_SYS_DSN = 4 # add a system DSNODBC_CONFIG_SYS_DSN = 5 #

Require a cross-platform installer, Python to the rescue

2005-05-21T19:53:00.000+10:00

The company I work for develops an ERP system that has it's heritage in implementations for medium size companies running on UNIX systems. As the global ERP vendors have moved in our space, we have had to move into the SME market which means running on Linux or Windows server systems. And since some of our new clients cannot afford the cost of a technical resource going on-site to install and

build-pk.py now part of Python Paste

2005-04-26T21:49:00.000+10:00

Ian has given me check-in access to the PythonPaste SVN, so I have checked in my cross-platform build-pkg.py script. Also looking at making a distribution of the 3rd party packages using Python Eggs.

Installing WSGIKit, opps I mean Python Paste under Win32

2005-04-23T12:50:00.000+10:00

Ian has been unhappy with the name WSGIKit, so it has been renamed Python Paste I think the name better matches what the package does, the WSGI glue that sticks all the python components together. Anyway have made some minor changes to my cross-platform build-pkg.py script so that it works more like Ian's shell script. Have sent a copy to him, so who knows, maybe it will be part of Python Paste.