making apps, making webs.

Yolk is an interesting little tool useful for listing packages on the pypi python package repository, and those 'eggs' installed with setup tools.

I've found it quite useful for seeing what stuff is installed on a machine, and to quickly look up packages from pypi.

Here's some of the things you can do with it:

yolk -H twisded
Launches your web browser at Twisted's home page

yolk -M Paste 1.0
Show all the metadata for Paste version 1.0

yolk -M Paste
Show all the metadata for each version of Paste listed on PyPi?

yolk -D cheesecake
Show all URL's for cheesecake packages you can download

yolk -T source -D cheesecake
Show only source code releases for cheesecake




Written by a Melbourne web developer. Available for your projects - php, mysql, e commerce, javascript, CMS, css, flash, actionscript, python, games, postgresql, xml.

Often whilst visiting bars, or night clubs I play a game with whomever I am with. It's called 'the perfect night club'. What we would do if we ran a night club? I'd add in vending machines for non-alcaholic drinks, I'd add in plenty of couches, I'd add in twice as many girls toilets... etc etc.

Looking through the cheese shop today I started playing the same game. Here's my top three changes I'd like to see:

1. What's changed? What has changed in this release of software? This is probably the most useful information missing for people tracking the cheese shop. Freshmeat has another useful piece of change information - a change summary. So you can quickly tell the focus of the release: bug fixes, security fixes, feature changes, etc. Other people don't find the cheese shop release information as useful as it could be too... planetpy blog

2. Faster browsing. The website is a bit slow. Mainly when browsing through the categories. I think …

It looks like SQLObject has versioning now.

"So, a version is a special attribute that catches updates and stores older values in a special additional table."

This is a very useful thing that I've been using on some projects myself. With it you can more easily recover from errors, and it also can allow your users to search through changes.

If SQL had versioning built in, it'd be much nicer. Temporal SQL is the name for this. However I think Oracle is the only major database to support it. No free ones do. So storing it in another table is an ok compromise.

I'm looking forward to the next SQLObject release - with versioning support, and other goodies.





Written by a Melbourne web developer. Available for your projects - php, mysql, e commerce, javascript, CMS, css, flash, actionscript, python, games, postgresql, xml.

Here's a song I made the other night - I thought some of you might find it funny.

http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/I-am-a-drum-machine.mp3

If you just want to play it in your browser, there is a flash based player here with it:http://www.pretendpaper.com



Written by a Melbourne web developer. Available for your projects - php, mysql, e commerce, javascript, CMS, css, flash, actionscript, python, games, postgresql, xml.

So you want to parse a website?

Python has some pretty cool html, rss, and atom parsing modules. There is also a promising CSS parser. This parser is cssutils.

http://cthedot.de/cssutils/

Parsing CSS is one part which can occasionally come in handy. Say you want to figure out how big a piece of text will display on a page? Without CSS parsing you can not test this.

You want to check to see if a piece of html is displayed at all? Well assuming we ignore javascript, CSS can be used to disable parts of a website with display:none or by setting the visibility or transparency. So this is another reason why you might want to parse CSS.

It's also handy if you are using CSS in your own non web based GUI engine. CSS is a fairly well understood language. So using it instead of your own format might be a good idea.


Above are some reasons why you might want to parse CSS with python. However I'm sure there are others which might pop into your head if you are a web developer.

Thanks to …

Today I noticed that CherryPy 3.0 has been released.

CherryPy is a multi-threaded production web server written in python.

The part I am interested in is the Web Server Gateway Interface(WSGI) component. WSGI is the glue which allows lots of python web code to talk to each other. A python WSGI server allows you to run python applications.

Up until now I have mostly been using the twisted.web2 wsgi code. This is fairly nice, and I can use other parts of twisted with it. However twisted.web2 is not finished.

CherryPy on the other hand has had a lot of work done on it polishing it up. It is used by quite a lot of people on real websites. A nice part of this work is the optimization work that has been done on it. Apparently CherryPy 3.0 is three times faster than the previous 2.x release. One of the authors also claims that it is the fastest WSGI server around.

For my simple benchmarks on my application it goes from 38 req/second with twisted, to 54 req/second with a slow AMD Duron 850…