Toward a Secret Sky

I am not kidding, this must be the easiest way to get a ajaxy table of results from a database. For those who haven't heard the buzz, CouchDB is a document-based database. I am not an expert in databases so I won't really comment about CouchDB itself. One incredible feature is that the database server is queryable over HTTP (with REST) and responds with JSON, which seems perfect for writing pure Javascript applications. YUI probably needs no introduction. I think its the best JavaScript library for maintainability, and documentation. It sometimes seems a bit verbose, but I like verbose. Note: You will have to get around the fact that you cannot make XHR requests to a server other than the server that the page lives on, either with a reverse proxy setup, or by hosting the files themselves in CouchDB. (I won't explain that here). So, a basic request to a database to return all the documents goes something like this: a GET to: http://myserver/dbname/_all_docs And that will ret...

Pysqlite doesn't allow you to access the same connection from different threads. The pysqlite manual says: "SQLite connections/cursors can only safely be used in the same thread they were created in." When using Storm (the ORM) with Werkzeug (the WSGI utility lib) we suffer from the problem that the Werkzeug reloader runs code in a thread. Ok this feature is not exactly important in a production environment, but I can't guarantee that whatever platform I will be deploying the application on will not be threaded, so database access should be proofed against this. The solution? The Storm manual mentions that you should use a Store/connection per thread. Someone has already done this with the Middlestorm application, which provides a threadsafe store in the WSGI environ. Rightly or wrongly (since I really don't want to have to wait to have a WSGI environ to get the store instance), and I am not exactly sure this kind of thing should be middleware, but that ...

With Leopard, OS X finally has a bundled virtual desktop implementation. Pre-leopard I used a (now unmaintained) 3rd-party app called VirtueDesktops to get this feature, and while not perfect, it worked fairly well. It certainly didn't annoy me. Spaces, on the other hand, does annoy me, to the extent that I find it unusable. Spaces SWITCHES MY DAMN DESKTOP WITHOUT ME ASKING IT TO. When I command-tab between applications, Spaces changes to the desktop with the active window. Now, at first when I encountered this feature, I thought "oh, that's pretty nice," and indeed it would be ok if it worked consistently. It doesn't, though. Usually Spaces switches correctly, but occasionally (say every 5 or 10 application-switches) it switches to the wrong desktop! If you don't believe me, try this out: Open two terminals, and put them on different desktops. Now open a browser on one of these desktops. Command-tab between the browser and the terminal a few times, and see w...

""" Desktop Widgets with PyGTK, Launchpad Remote Control We shall today be looking at a dumb hack I glanced upon while foolishly reading the list of GDK Constants in the PyGTK documentation. This hack sets the type hint of a GTK Window instance (the thing that tells the window manager how to treat it) as a desktop window, and hence embeds the thing in the desktop. It even works quite well: The window and widgets appear in the desktop The widgets are raised when the "Show desktop" command happens The widgets appear on all desktops (in Gnome and XFCE4, but not in KDE) The widgets appear fully functional So I got all excited and tried to think of an awesome use-case as the first plugin for a new kind of desktop widget framework. One which couldn't care less about eye-candy, and focussed on truly functional and useful desktop-based applets. As a friend commented while I was discussing the idea: "I am often hacking away in emacs when I decide that I want to...

A friend from Iran recently made me aware of something at Google code: http://pida.googlecode.com/files/PIDA-0.5.1.tar.gz You are accessing this page from a forbidden country. It's not for me to judge right from wrong, and of course I am not as clever as the policy makers at Google so I just can't comment. I just want to make people aware of this so that they can make informed decisions about where they host their projects.

Just a quick note to say that Pycon UK was great fun, and hopefully a great success. A big "thank-you" to the organisers and speakers. The talk I enjoyed the most was about Fluidinfo, mostly because I am a sucker for someone with a real vision. http://fluidinfo.com/ Hopefully, I managed to interest 1 or 2 people in PIDA with a little lightning talk. We'll see. Ali

Well, all this thought of asynchronicity is getting to me. But since we mentioned how to use subprocesses and Twisted, I think it is only fair to talk a bit about threads. So, what will we be doing? Create an abstraction for running threads in PyGTK Use it Now the thing which we will be wanting to run is a generator, call it "take_really_long". And it will surely block, and might be a bit intensive, and well we obviously need something asynchronous. A generator is a bit nicer to use than a single plain long-running function, because we can update the user interface every time it returns, making it much much easier to do things like Progress Bars. You must remember two things when using threads with PyGTK: 1. GTK Threads must be initialised with gtk.gdk.threads_init: import gtk gtk.gdk.threads_init() 2. Any code that modifies the UI (basically any code) that is called from outside the main thread must be pushed into the main thread and called asynchronously in the main loop, w...