Toward a Secret Sky

Two awesome things: Twisted , and Kamaelia . I will not compare them. They are different, and have different purposes, and as I said. Both are great. I have recently been playing with Kamaelia for the first time. If you don't know what Kamaelia is check out http://www.kamaelia.org/ but I admit it does take some getting my head around. (Just like Twisted did, back in the day when I first came across it.) But persevere. Kamaelia is a library for creating highly concurrent applications. And along the way it has reminded me of: Erlang, Tasklets and Twisted. It has a highly componentized approach where components communicate with eachother using inboxes and message passing. That's all I'll say about it here. I am sure I will blog more as I use it more. Now the first thing I want to do with Kamaelia is be able to hook it up with GTK, and I have managed to do that, but it was incredibly easy. Why? Because Kamaelia is happy to run its scheduler in the background in a non-main thre...

Well, I am always in search of new ways to host and serve code. Recently I have been using bitbucket.org's free service more and more. The benefits as I see them are: Mercurial hosting Ability to branch and publish any number of branches (a la launchpad) Plain web space for hosting generated documentation etc, with built-in wiki User interface entirely geared around source code I don't have to host it myself Responsive and generous developers Now if we were to compare this to some other things, we might have: (and please correct me if I am wrong). Mercurial Publish many branches Web space Wiki Hosted by someone else for free Bitbucket.org Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Launchpad.net No Yes No No Yes Google code No No No Yes Yes Self-hosted Trac Yes No Yes Yes No There are features that I would still really like, and the great developers are implementing them as we speak. The most exciting is the idea of an API where third-party applications could be written to do just about anything. S...

Ok, I'll start by saying that I love jQuery as much as the next developer, and every contributor has my eternal thanks, but there is a problem. Plugin development goes crazy, in that many similar plugins are released, and often these are just modifications including other sets of modifications. There must be a better way, like isn't this what version control is made for? Here is an excerpt of http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins#Forms * Autocomplete by Dylan Verheul Autocomplete with caching to limit server requests and other options. * jQuery Autocomplete Mod by Dan G. Switzer Modification of Autocomplete plugin with enhancements and bug fixes. * Modified Auto-complete by Anjesh Tuladhar Auto-complete plugin extended for auto-completing multiple words in the same text input * Autocomplete by Jörn Zaefferer Heavily improved Dylan Verheul’s initial plugin, integrating modifications by Dan G. Switzer and Anjesh Tuladhar. * jQuery Autocomplet...

It seems over recent months that my blog gets comment spam. I imagine any bloggers out there experience the same thing and it is a bit of a pain. I have three immediate problems with this and blogger.com. 1. Blogger doesn't notify me of all comments at the time they are posted. It notifies me of some, and I have of course configured it to notify me of all comments, but it seems to miss off about 70%. So not only do I not notice the spam, I also miss a bunch of legitimate comments. Please get it together Blogger! Ajax panel configuration is nice, but only if the core functions work. 2. Blogger should/could/might try to stop this spam before it happens. I am not guessing how, but then the company that runs Blogger.com are much brighter than me, and I am sure they have a solution. 3. The interface for browsing comments and deleting many at a time simply does not exist. This would make the task of sifting through, identifying, and delting spam much easier. Now that I have had my grumbl...

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...