blogbo!

Yesterday marked my first day starting work on a fansite for “The Wire” with my brother, should be a fun little Easter break project. Currently we just have an “under construction” page with a link to our uservoice page, the site will be entirely done with Django. I just getting started and have checked in the the latest version to svn, hopefully will come out with a nice framework for other fansites.  Anyway, check it out at www.waydowninthehole.com.

While working through university work I haven’t had much time to work on other things which I’d like to, however I’ve had enough time to play with a few Python libraries which have caught my eye.

Firstly, scrapy;

Scrapy is a high level scraping and web crawling framework for writing spiders to crawl and parse web pages for all kinds of purposes, from information retrieval to monitoring or testing web sites.

I wrote a little scrapy app which scrapes my university exam timetable and collates all the data in a .csv, with that I….

Post it to a Google calendar using my second new library, gdata, this is a cool library provided by Google which implements the Google api’s for Calendar, App’s, Blogger etc.. anyway, that left me with a pretty impressive calendar - the exams were at the end of Jan. The little Python script that posts it to Google Cal is here.

Finally I’ve recently been playing with CherryPy. I’ve been toying with a few ideas for websites so I wanted to look at some of the Python web frameworks, having already played with Django, which I like a lot but it’s a bit too large of a stack to deal with for small projects. I turned to look at CherryPy and it’s exactly what I wanted! I’ve only been playing with bits of it but it’s very cool and the community around it is awesome.  The only thing I’ve got up and running is the resultant Reddit clone from doing the Genshi tutorial. The code from the Genshi tutorial is also up on trac, here. Hopefully I’ll get one of my ideas prototyped soon.

There is quite a bit of stuff on my trac now, hopefully some of it might be useful to someone. If any of it is useful to you, let me know and I’ll slap a license on it for you or just grab it. My license of preference is the WTFPL anyway.

I seem to be unable to commit to blogging for some reason, I don’t know why it’s just not a natural thing for me. I recently re-read this post from Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror and StackOverflow fame) I’m not sure if I meet all those credentials, my writing certainly leaves something to be desired. I think I’ve got a few interesting things to say though! If only to satisfy my own desire to say them.

I’ve been following openSUSE for a while now, and last week was the major release of 11.1 which brought with it quite a few updates including the much anticipated KDE4.1 release. I found KDE4.0 to be a mixed bag, but with this new release I’m really enjoying the direction the KDE team are taking the project. It’s worth noting that I’ve prefered KDE over GNOME. Not only is it a damn nice looking desktop but I actually enjoying using it.

pwetty

I’ve also been trying to use Amarok 2 but it still needs some work before I’m happy with it replacing Amarok 1.4. For example it doesn’t handle compilation albums very well, look at what it does to my One Life Left CD!

how festive!

I hope they make better use of the chunk of space in the middle because the best thing about Amarok has been it’s use of space, if you look at 1.4 everything there is useful and well laid out.

There has been some interesting chat on the Kamaelia mailing list about Google Summer of Code and it’s effectiveness at getting contributers into the community. I don’t want to dwell on this point but reiterate a twitter update of mine:

SoC replaces a summer *job* and that’s its biggest flaw, it needs to mirror volunteer work / hobbies not jobs.

Personally I think reddit’s Feed a Need project has a very cool idea, perhaps something like that could be done for Summer of Code, and Google just offer T-Shirts to the participants, we all know people only do it for the T-Shirt anyway

Current projects:

• Looking at getting my Summer of Code project merged
• Django tutorial voting app
• Django “webcomic” app - really interested in getting this going if anyones interested.
• Playing with some things in Haskell from this amazing tutorial