Spyced

I ended up buying four pieces of equipment to help deal with being temporarily one-handed : the Matias half keyboard , the X-keys foot pedal (cheaper than the Kinesis pedals, which got lukewarm reviews on Amazon), the Keyspan PR-US2 Presentation Remote , and the Pacific Outdoors 17-LC100 Folding Recliner . The good: I'm very pleased with the recliner and modestly happy with the remote.  I got the recliner to take naps in; the brace on my arm didn't really accomodate lying down.  This $80 recliner compares well with zero gravity recliners costing over 10x as much.  (I've used two of the expensive variety; a BackSaver and one whose brand I don't recall.)  The only downside is you can either sit up, or recline fully; there is supposedly a way to adjust the recline angle, but it doesn't really work.  Expensive zero gravity recliners can all reliably lock at any angle you like. The remote mostly worked as a mouse substitute that I could use with my immobilized right han...

I separated my right shoulder so that arm is going to be out of commission for a while.  (I am right-handed.)  I'm managing about 25 wpm with one hand, or about 1/4 my normal speed.  This is frustrating.  The Handkey Twiddler has been out of production for a while.  The BAT is not OS X compatible. Anyone tried the Half Qwerty keyboard?  Are there other good options for under, say, $300?  (I found several very niche products for significantly more.) I do plan to try voice recognition for email and IM but I can't see that working very well for code.

I've been getting back into the Jython codebase this last week. The last time I submitted a Jython patch was in the beginning of 2004, so it's been a while. Things have changed... Jython is finally requiring Java 5 for the next release, which means the usual improvements, but especially good use of annotations. Here's some notes from my puttering around (mostly dragging Jython's set module up to compatibility with CPython 2.5's): Expect Eclipse to be slightly confused. (Lots of "errors.") This is normal. Use ant to build. ant regrtest is handy. run it before you start making changes so you know what's already broken in trunk. (At least between releases, jython does not appear to be religious about "no tests shall fail." But as a new developer you should make "no additional tests should fail" your motto.) Subjective impression: Jython re performace is a bit slow. Jython uses its own re implementation predating the Java re...

Currently, Jython ships with the pdb debugger module from Python 2.3. Unfortunately the 2.3 pdb is primitive even by command-line debugger standards. (For instance, if the program you are debugging throws an exception, it will take pdb down with it. Seriously. Did anyone actually use this thing?) Fortunately all you have to do to get a much better experience is grab pdb.py, bdb.py, and cmd.py (for good measure) from a 2.5 CPython installation and run against that instead. I've only tested this with Jython trunk but I think it should Just Work with the 2.2 release, too.

Last night the Utah Python User Group held an editor/IDE smackdown. I'm not going to write an exhaustive summary, but here are some highlights: ViM's OmniComplete is actually pretty decent. Calltip support in the GUI is also good. (GUI? ViM? Yeah, weird.) Emacs completion, from Rope, is also good. Emacs's refusal to make any concession to GUIs though keeps things clunky. Not that it isn't great that Everything Works over plain ssh; that's fine, but going through classic Emacs buffers for docstrings or completion means everything takes more keystrokes than it should while being less useful than having that information Always On. Rope also gives Emacs refactoring support that works surprisingly well. PyDev still sees a big win from the Eclipse platform. Specifically, even though Subclipse and Subversive are a bit weak compared to the gold standard (that would be TortoiseSVN), they are much better than what you get with Komodo or Wing. Now that I am on OS X (...

Don't communicate with them Treat them like they owe you something Google is off to a good (bad?) start with both of these in its management of the App Engine release. Of the 120+ issues logged by beta testers, a few have been closed as wontfix or duplicate; most have no response at all from the App Engine team. I can't think of any other company that I've filed an issue with that took that long to get back to me. The good ones get back within hours. The one exception I have seen is for the urllib issue , where gu...@python.org, presumably Guido, wrote Providing a urllib replacement implemented on top of urlfetch shouldn't be particularly hard. If someone is willing to produce one, I'd be happy to review it and, if it passes muster, try to get it added. Paraphrased: "maybe if you do our work for us we'll consider it." WTF! This isn't OSS, where "if you want something, do it yourself" is at least a semi-valid response. Ap...

App Engine sure has caused a stir . Some of the competition is already scared , with reason. But who is App Engine's real competition? In a lot of ways, App Engine is in a class by itself. It competes on the high end with Amazon Web Services . But it also competes on the low end with every shared host out there. And thanks to the integration of Google authentication and the application directory you could also make a case that in an orthogonal way it competes with Facebook's application API. At the low end, App Engine is a big deal for Python developers and anyone else who is allergic to PHP. Historically, you've really had to look hard for low end hosting that offered anything else. And as everyone who has given products away to colleges knows, Free is a fantastic hook to get developers to try out your platform. Once it's open for all, App Engine is going to become the preferred option for developers with the itch to write a toy or proof of concept and show...

Just for fun, here's the number of stars (interested people) for the different language-support feature requests for Google App Engine: Perl: 85 Java: 69 Ruby: 67 PHP: 23 C#: 11 jvm, not just java: 7 Common Lisp: 5 Update: Perl is stuffing the ballot box :)

Over three years ago (!), I wrote a screen scraper to turn the Python Job Board into an RSS feed. It didn't make it across one of several server moves since then, but now I've ported it to Google's App Engine: the new unofficial python job board feed . I'll be making a separate post on the Google App Engine business model and when it makes sense to consider the App Engine for a product. Here I'm going to talk about my technical impressions. First, here's the source . Nothing fancy. The only App Engine-specific API used is urlfetch. Unfortunately, even something this simple bumps up against some pretty rough edges in App Engine. It's going to be a while before this is ready for production use. The big one is scheduled background tasks . (If you think this is important, star the issue rather than posting a "me too" comment.) Related is a task queue that would allow those scheduled tasks to easily be split into bite-size pieces, which i...

I have been lucky to be able to fill our recent open positions with people who know Python as well as Java so now we are up to half the (6 person) company in that category and preferring Python, and 2 of the others have played with Python and liked it at least well enough to not object. So the boss has conceded that it makes sense to go the Python route for our next project. We're going to be doing a web, "next gen" version of our existing client-server project, which is mostly simple CRUD but does have 1000+ tables in its current incarnation. So we really need something that can autogenerate 90+% of the CRUD or we will go insane. The trouble is, I still don't really like any of the Python web options 100%. (I like the web options in other languages less, but I'm a perfectionist.) Django is well documented, its admin app is something everyone else envies, and newforms looks decent, but the ORM blows and I'm not fond of the template engine either. (...

After reading a blog post titled "The Abysmal State of Python IDEs" (which I won't link to because it's minformative, but it's easy to google by title), I wondered how the author managed to pick such a lousy group of IDEs to try. He tried "ActiveState" (does he mean PythonWin?), DrPython, SPE, and ScrIDE, only one of which is in the top 10 google hits for Python IDE. The google top 10 include Eric, Wing IDE, Radio Userland, SPE, PyDev, and Komodo. The Yahoo and MSN top 10s are similar. Except for Radio Userland, this is a much better group to start with, and one that in fact does include what I think are the only 3 Python IDEs worth trying. So how does a newbie end up picking such a lousy group of IDEs to try? The only likely possibility seems to be that he went to the top google hit, the python.org wiki page. Or possibly he went off of the top MSN hit, the c2 wiki Python IDE page. Both are (rather, were) heaping wads of products that mostly we...

I was talking to Adam Gomaa on Thursday when Ben Bangert stopped by us and told him he had an interesting blog. "If Ben says you have a good blog, I'll have to check it out," I told Adam. "That's not what I said," Ben corrected me. "I said interesting ." But it is good, and I'm glad I found it. And regarding Adam's post on declarative layers for SQLAlchemy , check out the new-in-SA 0.4.4 declarative plugin. It's almost exactly what Adam was looking for -- a little more verbose, in keeping with the "explicit is better than implicit" Python philosophy that SA shares, but creating your own superclass that creates a PK named "id" by default is just a few lines of code if that's what you prefer.

Saturday I'll be at the SQLAlchemy and State of PyPy talks. Then the board game BOF in the evening. In between, probably mostly the "hallway track." Sunday I plan to attend "What Zope did wrong" and "Core Python Containers." (I'd also like to see the Wingware presentation in the 11:35 slot, but since I can only pick one, I guess I can just cross my fingers that this year's video recordings actually get published somewhere.) Feel free to stop me and introduce yourself. (If we met at a previous PyCon, I've changed my hair around a lot from year to year. The photo on this blog represents what I look like now. I should probably stick with this for a couple years so people can recognize me.)

I'm taking a break during the evening tutorial in my hotel room on the second floor where I can enjoy the pycon wireless signal (which seems to be working quite well now). My name is Jonathan, and I am an introvert [too]. I suspect a lot of PyCon attendees can empathize. After the last tutorial session ends at 9:30, I'm planning to head down with my copy of Munchkin and see if anyone wants to start the board game social a day early.

My slides from this morning are up: http://utahpython.org/jellis/sa-intro.pdf . The about 1/3 of the class did not have SA installed yet, and the network was down. Fortunately, Mike and Jason brought 5 flash drives and by the time we got to the first exercise everyone was up and running. This was my third time doing a three-hour SQLAlchemy tutorial. Differences from (last time) include updated for the 0.4 series removed almost all the SQL-layer material added a section on the new relation filtering api Improved the parts of the Fundamentals sections that were poorly explained added a short section on the new-in-0.4 transaction management. There wasn't a wall clock in the tutorial room, so despite making an effort to be aware of time I went 10 minutes over. Sorry, guys. :) Jason Kirtland will be posting the slides from the Advanced SQLAlchemy tutorial soon.

A couple co-workers and I spent some time with Pylons yesterday, enough to get to where we started to feel productive, but not much more than that. I think there's value in a newbie's first impressions, so here are mine. I'm sure at least some of these are wrong. Poor documentation of core Pylons (Mako and SQLAlchemy are fine -- thanks, Mike ). I had to use the source several times. I'm still not really sure how Routes works, although I was mostly able to make it do what I wanted. The first tutorial overcomplicated things, showing how to configure things to handle semi-obscure requirements, without explaining those requirements or simpler alternatives. Helpful community. I got most of the answers I needed pretty quickly in the #pylons freenode IRC channel. Not much black magic: if you know Python you won't be struggling with weird Pylons-only concepts. It's all modules, classes, and dicts put together in an intuitive way (at least to my way of thinking). ...

SQLAlchemy will be well-represented this year with two tutorials and a talk. I'll be the primary instructor for the Introduction to SQLAlchemy tutorial. I just updated the pycon page with the outline of what we'll cover. The slides will be pretty similar to last time , only with more time spent on a high-level intro to ORM (object-relational mapping) for people who have little exposure to that. And of course last year 0.4 was not out. The SQLAlchemy documentation is thorough but a little intimidating. IMNSHO, the introduction tutorial is a great way to pick up the basics and get some practice, after which everything starts to make a lot more sense. Mike Bayer, the author of SA, will be the primary instructor for the Advanced SQLAlchemy tutorial. Jason Kirtland, one of the most prolific SA hackers besides Mike himself, will also be teaching. At the conference itself, Mike will be presenting Sqlalchemy 0.4 and beyond . To save you digging it out of the talks page, he...

Seriously, WTF . I'll summarize for those of you who are allergic to MSN knowledge base articles, although this one is fairly to-the-point: If you implement a FRAMESET whose FRAMEs point to other Web sites on the networks of your partners or inside your network, but you use different top-level domain names... IE silently rejects cookies sent from third party sites. This bit me today while adding facebook support to my text-based game -- I'm going the IFRAME route for fb support rather than rewrite the whole app in FBML thankyouverymuch, and yes, apparently IFRAME counts too for IE retard-mode. What makes me cry a little inside is not the two hours spent deep in old and crufty login and cookie-setting legacy code wondering what the flaming hell was going on. No, what makes me cry is that I got screwed by a setting that will never block the bad guys, because labeling yourself a good guy is entirely voluntary . It's like someone at MS read the evil bit RFC and took...

I'm reading the prerelease of the Scala book , since I'm working for a heavily Java-invested organization now and programming in Java feels like running a race with cement shoes. Politically, Jython doesn't seem like an option; Scala might be an easier sell. Here's some of my impressions going through the book. Scala is a decent scripting language [updated this section thanks to comments from anonymous, Jörn, and Eric.] Here's how you can loop through each line in a file: Python: import sys for line in open(sys.argv[0]): print line Scala: import scala.io.Source Source.fromFile(args(0)).getLines.foreach(println) The scala interpreter also has a REPL , which is nice for experimenting. This article has more examples of basic scripting in scala. Getters and setters One thing I despise in Java is the huge amount of wasted lines of code dedicated to getFoo and setFoo methods. Sure, your IDE can autogenerate thes...

My father got a ps3 for Christmas, but ran into some problems getting it on his wireless network. The first one was "connection error 80130128" after configuring it to use DHCP. I couldn't google anything useful about this; just a few other hapless victims asking if anyone had any ideas. Fortunately Dad had his laptop there too and noticed Windows complaining that two machines on the network were both using the same IP. So, over the phone, I walked him through setting up the ps3 with a static address: on his laptop, run -> cmd ipconfig Read the "gateway" ip. Put that into his browser to go to his router's admin page Find the DHCP settings for his router to see what range of IPs it hands out; pick one outside that range Set up the ps3 with that IP, the router IP as primary dns, and an opendns server as secondary This made the connection test happy. But when he tried to go to the playstation store, it gave a DNS error. If he repeated the connection te...