Reflog's Random Thoughts

2010-06-21T20:18:00.002+03:00

after stumbling on way too many issues that are documented poorly in developers docs or on the web i decided to open a small note-blog, to which i will post source code snippets related to different tasks you come accoss in mobile development.

http://stuffnobodytoldmeabout.blogspot.com

random thoughts 03/24/2008

2008-03-24T02:43:00.001+02:00

Convert Your Annotations to Blog Posts with 1-click

tags: diigo, to_blog

Diigo (which i started using lately) has this nice feature, to post specific tags directly to your blog... Let's see how it goes.

Flock 1.0

2007-10-21T09:29:00.001+02:00

Well... Is there a chance that I am actually liking this thing? Could that be?

Ohloh

2007-05-14T17:36:00.000+03:00

I've found out about this site called Ohloh It's a very nice idea, a social network for open source developers. It give a missing piece to the SourceForge concept - encouragement. It shows the projects you worked on, allows you to give Kudos to other developers, and track the project you love. I've added my profile, with some of the projects I've worked on. Take a look here It even generates a nice 'badge' to include on your blog: hint hint. this is something new i am working on.

12 Days Later

2006-11-09T20:07:00.000+02:00

11 days 8 hours 1 minute 24 second = 16321.24 minutes That's how much time I wasted in a very interesting place called Azeroth. Word of Warcraft captivated me for months, but now it's time to let it go. I've reached the maximum level, I've quested, I've PvP'ed, I met some nice people, I met tons of idiots... Just like in real life. This was a very interesting experience, but I think I am glad that it's over. So long, Azeroth, maybe we'll meet again some day.

Seconds before the leveling to the max.

Just dinged to 60!

Face of the mighty hunter...

Something in the works...

2006-08-02T14:18:00.000+03:00

Just dropping a little note here to let ya'll know that something is in the works at the Reflog's shop... http://reflog.googlepages.com http://code.google.com/p/pyterm/ More news to follow.

Fucking Flock

2006-06-15T13:35:00.000+03:00

So...

I've installed this 'fine' piece of software called Flock... A Web2.0 version of Firefox or what ever...

It acted very friendly and offered to import a shit load of settings and bookmarks from Firefox. I agreed.

Then it suggested to use del.icio.us integration. Cool. I agreed.

Then this fucker imported and merged all the bookmarks in wrong folders and mishmashed them with the posts I had in del.icio.us. Blarg. That was annoying.. But ok. I removed them all, and decided to reimport just from del.icio.us.

And here comes the funny part. Apparently - when I pressed delete on my local bookmarks... It deleted them permanently from del.icio.us aswell! With no confirmation!!!

After getting pissed as hell, I remembered that I imported del.icio.us to Yahoo! MyWeb a couple of days ago. So I decided to save what's possible from them.

So I've used their API to get all my posts. Without using and SOAP/REST whatever, I just copied an URL from ther docs, and changed it a little.

http://api.search.yahoo.com/MyWebService/V1/urlSearch?appid=YahooDemo&yahooid=YOURUSER&results=50

This will return a neatly structured XML of all your bookmarks with their tags.

Then the next step was parsing this data, preparing it, and shipping it off to del.icio.us.

Here's when trusty Python comes in:

Use ElementTree module to parse the xml using .fromstring method
Use PyDeleicious for adding tags

All in all - about 20 lines of code.

So after 10 minutes of mucking around with python code - all my bookmarks are back in place, and Flock is in my permanent SHIT LIST (and I see I am not alone: flocksucks.wordpress.com)

This was a public service announcement from Eli Yukelzon. :)

technorati tags:python, firefox

Plugins

2006-03-18T21:56:00.000+02:00

Here's a little preview of how plugins look in TurboBlog:

You can see here a 'Recent Posts' plugin, and a nifty little AJAX Chatterbox i.e. 'Shoutbox'. It took me about half an hour to write these, which is rather cool, considering this AJAX Shoutbox plugin idea that came up recently generated ALOT of buzz, for no apparent reason... Oh well. Have fun with it.
In other news - i just passed 111 posts ;)

Threaded comments!

2006-03-06T22:40:00.000+02:00

Ok. Since I am closing on Alpha version of Turbo Blog I need to stop adding major DB breaking changes. But until I do - here's another major one ;)
I've implemented threaded comments! Yup. With a nice DHTML feel, pick a comment, press a reply and volia - an editor appears, and sub-comment can be added!
Sweet!

First shot at plugins

2006-02-27T19:06:00.000+02:00

In changeset 25 I introduced a first stab at adding plugins to TurboBlog.
It was actually redicilously easy using entrypoints from setuptools.
To take a look how it is done, I've added a sample 10 line plugin that adds a 'Recent Posts' to the sidebar of the blog.
Cool stuff! Technorati Tags: turbogears, turboblog, python

RPC Backend

2006-02-07T21:27:00.000+02:00

After stumbling in my own stupidity for a while, and with help from folks over at TG mailing list, I've figured out the whole XMLRPC thingie.
So now we have it in TB, and so:

Ping backs implemented (endpoint is '/RPC', method: 'pingback.ping')
blogger API implemented 100%
mt API implemented 100%
metaWeblog implemented 90% (the newMediaObject does nothing)
...and we have trackbacks!

I'd really like to hear some comments on where do you think I should go next with this (i warn you, I will disregard any sexual references! :) ), what to implement next, and etc.
C`ya Technorati Tags: turbogears, turboblog, xmlrpc

Trackbacks are IN!

2006-02-04T16:34:00.000+02:00

In Changesets 17 we have these changes:
Blog settings interface added (WP rip off)
Live search placed (not working yet)
Trackbacks (sending AND receiving). Yep. All implemented as per SixApart spec. Nifty!
Check it out! Technorati Tags: turboblog, turbogears

Cleaning up TB.

2006-02-01T22:32:00.000+02:00

I received some nice feedback from the TB newsgroup, and here's the changelog as a result:

Fixed post editing
Fixed draft publishing
Fixed spelling
Fixed table names. - it's a breaking change. you'll have to recreate the DB by deleting old tables, and running 'tg-admin sql create ./createdb.py' . This was necessary to working with other backends, not just SQLite.
First settings are in - you can now select and store default blog, and site admin.
Blog selector - if in Site Dashboard you select 'Blog selector' as a default page, when reaching first page of the site, you'll see the list of all available blogs.

Coming up next - per blog settings editing and search.
If you have suggestions - post them.
You have problems - open tickets.
You fixed bugs - submit patches!

Peace!

Technorati Tags: turboblog, turbogears

Finishing up the dashboard

2006-01-30T22:21:00.000+02:00

Hello there.
Today I've hacked a bit more on the TurboBlog code. Here's what I came up with:

Tag clouds. Yep we have those. One click to turn the list view of tags, into cloud view.
Main page prettyfing. Avatar now looks better, tags are not stuck together
Tag managment is complete (add/remove/rename)
Comment managment is complete (view/mass edit/delete)

Basicly at this point only two main things are missing:
a) Settings (global and per-blog)
b) Search (i should add one on the main page, and activate those in managment parts)

After that, I think we can have a nice 0.1 release ;)

A newsgroup of TurboBlog

2006-01-29T17:54:00.000+02:00

	TurboBlog
	Browse Archives at groups.google.com

I've setup a group for TurboBlog discussions. I'll post change-logs from the SVN, and other related news. Drop by! Technorati Tags: turbogears, turboblog

pre-alpha of TurboBlog nears!

2006-01-25T21:11:00.000+02:00

Mkay.
I've had some nice progress on TurboBlog today, here's what we have:

Comment submition fixed
Blog add/delete added
User add/delete/update added
Post creation added (finally!)
Admin-topbar revised, now work correctly

If Ksenia keeps in-sync with SVN, you can check all the new stuff live! (hint hint)

Technorati Tags: turboblog, turbogears, python

TurboBlog live-site

2006-01-25T13:35:00.000+02:00

This is sweet!

Ksenia Marasanova from TG's mailing list was kind enough to provide hosting for live demonstration of TurboBlog.

Check it out LIVE!

Technorati Tags: turbogears turboblog

Dashboard progress

2006-01-21T20:05:00.000+02:00

...and here are some screenshots to prove it...

The user managment:

Post Managment:

Blog overview:

Blog dashboard:

Post editor:

and all these goodies are ofcourse already in the svn.

Tags:

...And the work began

2006-01-17T22:12:00.000+02:00

Ok. I forced myself to begin working on the Admin section. WP knockoff again:

Tags:

Podcasts

2006-01-17T13:56:00.000+02:00

About two months ago I joined the Yappies around the world and bought myself a 60GB Video iPOD.
Yep, the 5G, black one. But that's not what I wanted to post about. I wanted to post about Podcasts. It's not a new thing, but it gaining momentum these days. Read the Wikipedia, it's insightful as always.
Anyhow, I wanted to share my list of subscriptions, with little descriptions aswell:

Audible Ajax - A show from guys at Ajaxian.com about all things AJAX, with interviews of the most important developers in this field.
Diggnation - A show hosted by Kevin Rose Alex Albrecht (TechTV guys) about the most popular topics from their social-news site called Digg.com , is very light and fun show.
Engadget - Very professional show about EVERYTHING that there is to know about coming up gadgets and tech-toys.
Gillmor Gang - Discussions with various influential people of the industry. Can sometimes be dull, but mostly rather interesting.
Inside the Net - Leo and Amber (TechTV) talk about all the new Web2.0 sites and new project buzz around the net.
Infected - A hysterical show by Martin Sargent (Unscrewed). Nothing tech-related, but a good laugh is garantied.
The Web 2.0 Show - As the title says, it's a show about Web 2.0 trends, and has some very interesting guests.
this WEEK in TECH - Called 'Best podcast of 2005', this is another Leo's show with John Dvorak and many other hosts, one of my definite favorites. Very up-to-date stuff.

So there you have it. This is what keeps me occupied on my drive to work. If only I could manage to hard-wire the iPOD into my Honda Civic's radio, and not suffer from that FM transmitter that I have... Oh well.
Till next time,
Cheers.

Technorati Tags: podcast, ipod

ToDo For TurboBlog

2006-01-16T21:41:00.000+02:00

Finish the damn admin section (use TinyMCE as post editor)
Add ping reciever and sender
Add trackbacks
Add recent posts to index view sidebar
Add settings dialog to admin, allow to select default blog, or show a blog-list page by default.
Add gravatar support?
~~Pingbacks are probably out of the question since TurboGears/CherryPy won't work with XMLRPC... Need to check it, though.~~ Silly me. CherryPy has XMLRPC filter. Nifty. Will do pingbacks then :)

What is google thinking???

2006-01-16T20:48:00.000+02:00

I just came across this site. This stuff is amazing! Using speech recognition to index and search content of Podcasts! Whe the hell isn't this thing aquired by Google yet?

Tags: podcast

Fat Bastard

2006-01-16T17:25:00.000+02:00

Since this is actually a blog, and a blog is a place where a person who nobody wants to listen to dumps his ramblings and frustrations, and... Posts pictures of his cat!
That's what I'll do now. I present - Lenny - a.k.a Fat Bastard.

I just had to...

2006-01-16T14:18:00.000+02:00

I know I shouldn't post this, because it's politically incorrect, but I couldn't help myself, so here's a link to
Best blond joke ever!

Some more TurboBlog Progress

2006-01-14T21:31:00.000+02:00

Oki. So, I've been hacking some more on TurboBlog project. And something came out of it :) First of all, I realised the SQLObject supports Inherited Tables. Which is very cool, and allowed me to subclass TG_User, and merge it with UserDetails, and cut like 20 lines of code with it. Nifty.
I've prettified the login/signup screens, in style of WordPress (hey, I know NOTHING about designing sites...) and cleaned stuff up a bit.
here's how it looks now:
This is main blog index screen, notice the admin panel that appears on top when you logged in with certain permissions. It can either take you to admin section, logout, of post a new entry.

This is the post/comments view screen. For each registered user, avatar is shown.

The already mentioned login screen...

And a sign-up screen, with avatar upload, and... anti-automation-key-code-verification thingie :)

That's it for today. G`Nigh y`all!

Tags:

TurboGears guys are at it again...

2006-01-10T22:14:00.000+02:00

It's almost impossible to follow all the greate stuff that is going on at the TurboGears group. Configuration was moved to native Python files, which is neat, some patches are coming in to implement Ian's awesome error reporting system as decorators, Jeff's Identity framework now has Visitor Tracking, and magic table autocreation. There's probably more, but it's tough to stack in touch.
Keep it up guys!

Another TurboBlog update

2006-01-10T09:06:00.000+02:00

Mkay. Here are some changes I've commited today:

User avatars can now be actually seen

Author details are taken from the db

If only only blog is defined, it's owner is not shown in posts subtitle

rss/atom feeds now work (per blog)

changes needed to work with latest svn version of TG are made

create_db script: this is actully important. after defining your db in dev.cfg run this script. it will create all needed table values and default settings

have fun!

Tags:

TurboBlog ToDo

2006-01-06T15:53:00.000+02:00

Sooo... Now that the cat is out of the bag (was there a bag really?), here are the things that need to be done before it could be called atleast half-baked:

Admin dashboard: for now it has a simple plain page linking to two generic DataControllers for blog/user editing. No settings/posts/tags is available at all.
Login/Logout is somewhat broken. Redirection after the action doesn't work.
Comment posting is allowed only for logged in users.
There is no user-registration page ;)
There is not user-details page (although there are links to it)
No validation on fields. It REALLY needs to be done.

these are the major ones. Most of the other things work rather nicely.

Tags:

TurboBlog is in da house!

2006-01-06T15:45:00.000+02:00

Hello there!
So... After all this talking about TurboGears based blog engines, I had to put some sources out there to back my ideas. So I did.

Here you can browse the SVN.

Don't be too harsh, it should be in rather un-usable state ;)

Before commiting, and I went and redid the whole url scheme that I had using 'slugs'. Probably it broke one or two things.

So, take a look, browse around, and bash me for the ugly code that is in there :)

Cheers.

Technorati links: TurboGears | Python

Am I Begin A Goat? A Toasty one?

2006-01-04T15:55:00.000+02:00

I've been contacted by Jared and Michele who are working on Toasty goat project together with D.Stanek, with suggestion to see what others are doing in terms of TruboGears powered blog engines. So I went, and took a closer look. All-in-all it's a rather nice project. It is still in a VERY alpha stage, but who am I to judge? I didn't even publish the sources yet for my project :)

Now, about the suggestion of merging the efforts... It's a tough topic to tackle. My experience in Open Source community so far is rather limited one. I actively participated in only one project (PyQlogger) and I was the lead programmer of it, so I could call the shots, and it was rather nice. Being a despot has it's merits :)

So I was browsing the sources, and though I did saw a couple of things that were done better than in my project: variableProviders usage, I didn't even know it existed, validators for forms, which I hesitated to add, slugs (text ids) instead of numeric ids for posts, and nice 'theme-in-a-dir' concept.

On the other hand... The code is very far from the style that I prefer, the methods concerning comments are in the RootController instead of their own one, posts have only one date field and are sorted by it (meaning that If i edit a post I published a day ago, it will pop up in front of my newer posts), the current design is for single-blog, and written with the assumption that it will stay that way, and no Identity management is implemented (but i think this is one of the next steps, coz with Identity Framework of TG it's waaay too easy :) )

Anyhow, I don't want to sound like a wining weasel, and probably I suffer from syndrome that most coders have: "I Can Write Better One" syndrome. At any rate, I do not try to claim that what I am writing will be better, it's just modeled a bit differently. I cannot claim anything actually, until I publish my sources so people can judge for themselves...

So, time will tell, and for now - to Jared and the ToastyGoat team: keep up the good job!

Hope I don't get flamed too much for this post :)

some shots

2006-01-02T23:03:00.000+02:00

Here are some screen shots to prove the progress :)

I know that they aren't that exciting, but hey - it's supposed to look just like a regular blog, no?

TurboWow

2006-01-02T22:52:00.000+02:00

Hi there.
This is a little something that kept me occupied for a while now. Like a month back I got back into checking the hype around AJAX (i've posted about this a while ago). I've started to check it out with the Ruby On Rails project but kinda dropped it for two reasons: I didn't get into Ruby that much, still prefering Python, and I didn't have any project to apply it to. Two weeks ago I was asked at my work to code a little in-house monitoring app for our servers, and I decided to check out what's out there in the Python field for coding this. So, I came across project called TurboGears, which is a Mega-Framework. Actually, it's a glue on a slew of awesome Web development projects already available in Python - Kid, SQLObject, CherryPy and MochiKit. I won't dive into much details, but each project is very mature and very well documented with VERY active communities which I totally dig. So I've coded that app, and it took me around one day or so! I was totally amazed by it. Here's a quote from my post to TurboGears newgroup:

Good day, All. Just wanted to share my regards for this great product you've all been working on! I was required to develop a small in-house monitoring solution for our servers for the support team, and I used TurboGears for it. The basic outline of the project was done in about 20 minutes, the actual monitoring code - additional 20 minutes (since Python is my language of choice), css styling of the site - minutes, implementation of access control, using Jeff's excellent Identity framework, another 20 minutes, adding awesome eye-candy ajax enabled, full-blown grid control from Ronald's CatWalk - another 20 minutes. Polishing, hooking up Postgres DB instead of SQLite - 20 more. All in all - a full blown, slick, fast product - 2 hours of fun work.

Yup, that was really fun. Lately I had some more time to fiddle with TurboGears, and I talked with awesome guys at the newsgroup (including Kevin Dagnoor), so I picked up another rather popular topic to implement - a Blog engine. I call it TruboBlog (yes, my originality shines yet again) and it's a total WordPress knock-off. It already has everything except the Admin section:

Multiple Blogs
Multiple Users
Complex permissions system (defines what logged in user can or cannot do, like: post, comment, moderate comments, admin the site)
Comments (with features like: add comment, edit comment in-place (using AJAX), approving comment in place (AJAX aswell)
Post archives (by any format) with browsing
Post tags (can add tags to posts in-place (AJAX again)), and browsing by tags
Templates (using Kid engine). It's rather tedious, but still way better than the Word Press PHP style.

After I finish up the admin section of the engine, I'll release the sources. It's a rather hackish project, but maybe someone will find it interesting to poke with it. I just hope I find enough time to polish it a little.

More firefox goodies

2005-12-28T20:52:00.000+02:00

Hi there.

So, lately, with the release of Firefox 1.5 some fresh and neat extensions popped up. These two I found out to be very useful:

Performancing - a sweet in-browser blogging platform. How cool is that? If I had it 2 years back, I would'nt have even started to write PyQLogger. It is small, fast, right-where-you-need-it tool, and I am posting this entry with it! Highly recommended.

Foxmarks - a long-awaited bookmarks syncing extension. I use Firefox in 3 places - Work, Home (WinXP), Home (Linux). And in each one I add or remove bookmarks. Keeping them in-sync is essential. And that's what this extension does. It provides with some ftp space to store the bookmarks and syncs/merges/updates the bookmarks. Sweet!

And couple of new sweets from the Greasemonkey front, from persistent.info site, including Color-Coding for labels (very usefull) and more keyboard macros, like 't' for trashing the mail, 'r' for marking mails as read. Nifty!

Firefox still proves to be THE web-platform.
Kudos!

GMail SPAM

2005-12-23T11:58:00.000+02:00

This is getting annoying... So far my GMail account was rather spam-free, I was getting around 10 spam a day, and it was all blocked. But lately, this is gone WAY downhill. Each day I find this in my Inbox:

WTF? C`mon Google... With all that brain power... Can't you do something?

It's alive!

2005-08-11T19:47:00.000+03:00

Beleive it or not - the blog is still alive :) The times have been weird lately at my job, and it affects my hobby patterns. But never mind that, let's see what I've been up to...

I'm always trying to keep my finger on the pulse when it comes to fresh technologies and software terms. So when half of the blogosphere started talking about Ruby-On-Rails and AJAX, I had to check it out. All I gathered from the posts is that it's some cool way to create snappy blog engines, and since I was going to work on a project involving web-interace, I decided to give it a spin, and see what's the buzz all about.

First of all - I didn't know Ruby. Basicly, Ruby is another P language, as in Perl/Python/PHP. Less of the PHP, more of Perl, with OO from Python, that's the way I see it. It's a really sweet language, a bit too Perlish for my taste, since I became quite fond of Python's code clarity, but still rather slick. Let's say, if I had to choose from Perl and Ruby a language for some new project, I think I'd choose Ruby. I've browsed through Programming Ruby book, which is awesome, it gives you just the same boos as the Dive Into Python (which actually got me hooked), gathered the basic understanding and moved to Rails.

Apparently Rails is a very neat idea. It's a set of scripts and a library of code, that allows you in minutes (literally!) link your database model and content to code, and display it all very neatly in a browser. It provides a full Model/Controller system, where you stuff all the 'actions' inside the controller, and define table relations in the model. It's all very clean and easy on the typing, and it does save you a lot of time when working on CRUD(CReate/Update/Delete) which is the most tedious task in all DB backended apps.

If you think on taking Ruby On Rails for a spin, I suggest you watch the 10 minute video from Rails Academy, it will really wet your appetite. Unfortunatly amount of time that I had for this project quickly went to shit, and I had to put it in the back burner for now...

What I plan to tackle with next, is my arch-nemesis - JAVA. The language I fear more than death itself. I exagurate ofcourse, but so far, my experience with Java is the same as I have with Physics: we don't like each other. We'll see how it goes...

Pyrex Rocks!

2005-07-13T22:12:00.000+03:00

In the project I am writing now I need to interface to F-Secure daemon, to scan files for viruses. They provide a very nice SDK to be used with C/C++, but ofcourse nothing for Python.

Here's where I come in :) When you hear words 'SDK', 'library' and 'Python' in the same sentance, the next thing you should immidiately think of - Pyrex
It's a nifty tool that provides you a very Pythonic way to write glue code to different libraries. You define what you want to import from the library, define the API of the exported functions, then create a wrapper class to access those, and it compiles it into a nifty Python extension! All you are left to do afterwards, is 'import my_ext' and use the class from it!
Since in the past I was messing with Perl and XS, I can truly appriciate the beauty of this approch!

Tomorrow I think I'll document the code, make a package and post it to PyPi. Stay Tuned.

Python Locks

2005-07-12T17:54:00.000+03:00

In the project I am developing right now there is a lot of threading done, and therefor some of the code needs to be protected by Mutexes. So, to save my self from finger-breaking, repetative task of lock aquiring and releasing, I wrote a small decorator (python 2.4) to help me out:

def lock_on(lock):
    def decorator(f):
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            lock.acquire()
            try:
                result = f(*args, **kwargs)
            finally:
                lock.release()
            return result
        return wrapper
    return decorator

Somewhere globally I have a hash of different mutexes, and when I need to create a critical section around some function, now all i have to do is this:

@locked_on(locks["some_mutex"])
def my_func(self):
    pass

Nifty!

Unfreezing the blog

2005-07-09T13:53:00.000+03:00

Hi there. I think I will be slowly unfreezing the blog now.
The pressure of the exams is dying down, I have some interesting project ideas, and basicly the mood is back :)
Due to the last changes in Blogger API, PyQLogger is broken and will not work (authentication problems). One day I will get to it.

Qt 4 is out now, and it's open source even on Windows. Many great, and appealing additions were made to it, so as soon as the nice folks at RiverBank will get to make PyQt4, i'll rewrite PyQLogger for it.
i've stumbled upon this gem today, and just had to share it. Man I love Python!


# Mandelbrot set
print (lambda Ru,Ro,Iu,Io,IM,Sx,Sy:reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda y,
Iu=Iu,Io=Io,Ru=Ru,Ro=Ro,Sy=Sy,L=lambda yc,Iu=Iu,Io=Io,Ru=Ru,Ro=Ro,i=IM,
Sx=Sx,Sy=Sy:reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x,xc=Ru,yc=yc,Ru=Ru,Ro=Ro,
i=i,Sx=Sx,F=lambda xc,yc,x,y,k,f=lambda xc,yc,x,y,k,f:(k<=0)or (x*x+y*y
>=4.0) or 1+f(xc,yc,x*x-y*y+xc,2.0*x*y+yc,k-1,f):f(xc,yc,x,y,k,f):chr(
64+F(Ru+x*(Ro-Ru)/Sx,yc,0,0,i)),range(Sx))):L(Iu+y*(Io-Iu)/Sy),range(Sy
))))(-2.1, 0.7, -1.2, 1.2, 30, 80, 24)
#    \___ ___  \___ ___  |   |   |__ lines on screen
#        V          V      |   |______ columns on screen
#        |          |      |__________ maximum of "iterations"
#        |          |_________________ range on y axis
#        |____________________________ range on x axis

Don't try this at home, kids!

Well, stay tuned, more posts are coming up!

Some muttering

2005-03-01T14:54:00.000+02:00

I've been off-blog. I know.

Main reason for this: I'm bored. There are several modes for being bored. Sometimes you have nothing to do and no inspiration to do anything. That's really bad. And sometimes, the sheer amount of work you do is so un-interesting, that you still stay bored, although very busy.
That's the state I'm in right now.

PyQLogger had reached the state, where all the fun coding ended, and now the dreadful ton of bugfixing is on my back. But since the interest in the project from outside has went down hill, Xander and me are busy with Real Life (tm) stuff, it just doesn't seem like I'll be able to wrap it up nicely. I know I should, but it became a large project, and handling it alone, with lack of time is really hard.

On other topics:
Lately I've been needing some clone of Google's Desktop Search for Linux. The most serious one seems to be Beagle, and it's REALLY impressive from their demos. Unfortunatly, it works by using DBUS and I haven't been successful in setting it up. That was very discouraging, so I've went to look around and may be try to write my own.
I've took LuPy, which is a partial port of Lucene search engine to Python, and wrapped some classes together. Now I have a full text, fast indexer for my python files. Very nice.
It still looked kinda clumsy to me, so I kept looking around and found this:
Pixies Desktop Search by Matteo Merli. Looks very promising. And although author decided to rewrite the indexer engine (which is very admirable, though hard), it looks like a project that I would be interested to take part in.
I've exchange two mails with the author, and I think i'll get contributing soon.

Yeah. And I love python. Why? Because of this:
Mini TCP server for plain text protocol:

from SocketServer import ThreadingTCPServer, StreamRequestHandler
class ClientHandler ( StreamRequestHandler ):
    def handle(self):
        print "got this from socket: %s"%self.rfile.readline()

server = ThreadingTCPServer ( ('', 7777) , ClientHandler )
server.daemon_threads = True
server.serve_forever()

Now that ROCKS!
Oh. And one last thing, I came across this very nifty Firefox extension called ScrapBook

ScrapBook is a Mozilla / Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are:

Save Web page

Save snippet of Web page

Save linked Web page

Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks tree

Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection

Simple Editing of the collected Web page

Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera's Notes

I highly recommend it.

Some crap from college

2005-02-18T21:57:00.000+02:00

Ok. Here's something completely unrelated to things I usually write here :)

For one course at my college I was required to write so odd-ass code, and I thought someone would be interested to take a look.
The first thingie is a primitive digital signaturing tool for executable files. It works by scanning the compiled code for a free segment and writes a RSA signed key part that can be verified later, if needed.
The code is on Python script that patches the original program for watermarking, and creates a new script that can be used to verify the watermark. It was an interesting experiment with public-key cryptography and RSA, and was rather entertaining.
Anyway, here's the code. [link]

The second thing is an alternative for GNU's Gettext program. It scans the source code of C/C++ program and extracts all the strings, and prepares the source code for automatic translation. There were 3 versions of this program.
First was a fun one, coded in Python, where I used Finite State Machine method. It worked flawlessly but was immensly slow because I used char-by-char processing of the text, which was totally un-efficient.
Here's the [code].
Here's the FSM's [code].
Here's the diagram of the FSM: [picture].

Second was a rewrite, without any FSM, using regular expression. This one was extremly fast, but later found out that Python's regex engine is very weak, and crashes horribly on deep recursions in the expression. That was very discouraging, since I became a real Python fanatic and that was disappointing.
Here's the [code].

The last version was rewritten in Perl with basicly the same code - but it worked twise as fast and didn't crash at all! Odd stuff...
Here's the [code] :)

All this was probably a total waste of your reading time... But it's my blog so... Stuff it! ;)

New centralized logging

2005-02-08T19:01:00.000+02:00

Ok, this was due for quite a while now... Anyhow, as you can see on the screenshot, we now have a foldable panel with all log messages from the program. The debug message level can be controled from the settings dialog.

Oh, and btw, this concludes my list of TODOs! And this means one thing - I'm wrapping things up. Time to get this baby polished and shrink-wrapped.

PyQLogger update dose

2005-02-07T16:19:00.000+02:00

New UI for main screen

Here button text is not shown, and you can see the status bar.

Now apparently, some people like text under buttons, so now it's possible to enable it as well:

Here you can see the text under the buttons, the status bar is hidden, together with the panel with the posts (it's collapsed to left side)

I'm still not quite sure I like this new design, but i'm getting used to it. In other news, three new plug-ins were created:

Code paste plug-in. Using code2html program, you can now paste colored source code
reST plug-in. Since it's a python program, and there are lots of Python freaks who like blogging in reStructuredText format, I've whipped a quick plug-in that works with it as-well.
Textile tags plug-in. As a test for 'Menu plug-in' type, i've made this puppy, which helps me write Textile text by providing almost the same functions as the main toolbar.

Choose Python

2005-02-02T13:49:00.000+02:00

Ok. Being a Python fan. And being a Trainspotting fan, when I came across this I had to post a link. Awesome:

Word!

Random bla bla.

2005-02-02T11:38:00.000+02:00

Hmm... This mo rning I went to my GMail box to check for new mail, and was surprised to find there 50 new invites! WTF? Well, anyhow, if anyone needs one - drop me a note here. Although, these days, everyone who's at least a bit geeky has account there...

In the totally unrelated news:

Dunno how the heck did that happen

And now some stuff from the PyQLogger front:

I'm writing this post with 2.0 version, having it spell-checked on-line , with all the plug-ins working just great.
I've made a new plug-in that's called Templates. It allows you to store a set of pre-defined text blocks with keywords and then just press Ctrl-J while editing, select the needed template from list and it pastes the code! Very handy.
I've kicked old post editor out of the window, now the only possible editor is Scintilla. I think it's the right way (and since it's ALWAYS installed with PyQt, availability is not an issue here)
The progress is really good these days, and I'm hoping to get closer to some sort of a beta next week or so. No promises though.

Look what the cat dragged in!

2005-01-29T15:15:00.000+02:00

Lookie, lookie. What's that?

Oh yeah, we have an online spell checker now! Works really smooth, btw ;)

It was quite a pain making Scintilla do what I wanted it to do, but in the end - very rewarding. Anyhow, because I think it's a rather usefull feature, I'll make it permanent in the code, not a plugin. Plus we'll bundle the ASpell bindings with PyQLogger. (it should also work on windows, btw)

Oh, and btw, since I was very impressed with some Flash demos I've been seeing lately, I plan to use VNC2SWF to create some introductionary shows of PyQLogger. It should be ready before the 2.0 release.

Plugins commited!

2005-01-27T17:54:00.000+02:00

Ok. Let's see what I've got for you today... Tons of commits today, lots of code went in... Plugins are in! Take a look at the screenshots (click to zoom):

This is the Plugins tab in Settings dialog. Plugins can be enabled/disabled and configured.

Here's how the usual configuration for plugin would look like:

Now here's the tricky part. The stuff that you see as Plugin Properties is actually generated when the dialog is shown, based on plugin's internal structure. Each plugin defines what types of options it want's to use. Then all the settings are stored in central XML file in ~/.pyqlogger

Next step - rewrite the ToolbarManager to load the default buttons, so we'll get all the basic functionality in place.

Anyhow, it's going rather well, hope I'll be able to finish it before my next semester...

WiKi Redesigned

2005-01-26T16:51:00.000+02:00

Today I've decided that pyqlogger's wiki is designed rather poorly. Plus it missed the main point - to draw attention to the program.

So i've redesigned it. All the main sections can be reached from navigation bar at the side, and at the main page you'll get all the new developments from PyQLogger front. Enjoy.

oh, and i dunno if i've mentioned this before, but Livejournal support is completly functional in the trunk! Yeppie.

And one last thing. The nice folk over at WingWare granted me a free license for their excelent WingIDE Pro. Huge thanks to you, guys!

This logo can now be seen at the Wiki

Some slow progress

2005-01-13T15:32:00.000+02:00

Howdy y'all. Today I'll treat you to some screenshots of new dialogs from PyQLogger 2.0. Yes there is such a beast! And the first drafts are coming along quite nicely. First of all, here's the login dialog (notice the new logo, made by Xander):

Here the user can select different accounts for different blog providers (Blogger/LJ/MT and etc)

Now we have the first draft of the settings dialog:

For this dialog, user can add more account, or modify existing ones, load/unload/configure plugins and control the way GUI behaves.

And a little something for the end, Account Settings dialog:
I think it's rather self explaining.
Now about the design of the 2.0 version.

It's not AtomAPI only client anymore. Other backend will be available.
At first I plan to implement MetaWeblog protocol (over XMLRPC) and LiveJournal
The configuration is moved to XML, in the most dynamic way - XMLObject. Now the classes serialize them selves. Very modern :)
The approach of subclassing is thrown away. Now I work with QWidgetFactory. As a result - size of code slashed in half (since we don't supply generated .py stub classes, but just .ui xml descriptions) and loading times are much better. Plus the development cycle is shorter. And if you are a real freak, you can open .ui in Qt Designer and move the buttons around, change the UI to the way you like it.
There are many more ideas for the new version. Take a look at the TODO page in the WiKi and tell us what you think!

A Major slowdown.

2005-01-09T01:15:00.000+02:00

Good day, all.

Sorry for complete lack of updates, but things have been really with Real Life™.
There was a version cut-off at work, and I’ve been working on it 12 hours a day, which leaves me with very little time for PyQLogger. But the designes for the new version are almost done, and I will publish the UML‘s on the WiKi as soon as possible.

That’s it for now,
Keep it real.

Oh yes, almost forgot. If any of my reader is in touch with packagers of Linux distro's, I would be very interested in getting PyQLogger shipped with them. Because I don't really know how the whole process of getting accepted in the distor works, I'm kinda clueless here, but I do think that having PyQLogger shipped with some major linux distro would bring much more attention to the program. For example, I've looked at the state of the Drivel which is considered a serious GTK client for Blogging... And what can I say... Without bragging, Drivel has NOTHING on PyQLogger. Seriously... And i really wish more people would see that.

We've got listed!

2004-12-29T11:26:00.000+02:00

My Google Alert on PyQLogger brought something new today, apparently we've listed at FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory. And that is rather cool!
To see the entry [click here]

A Pleased customer :)

2004-12-28T13:50:00.000+02:00

Ok. I know that being vain is bad, but it's very nice to hear good words about the job you are doing. This is quoted from Sharon Kimble's Blog

One thing that I really do like when working on linux is the ability to talk to the program developers about their program and any problems that I'm having with it. A case in point is a program called PyQLogger where I was having problems getting my previously posted entries from my already published blog. Through emails we set up a conversation using Instant Messenger, where the programmer [Eli] was able to talk me through various things, and when I hit a problem he was obviously trying it out at his end because he hit exactly the same problem. I learnt a whole lot more about his program, how to do various things, and he learnt that there was a problem within his program.

The end result is that he has today put out a new version of his program, just over twenty-four hours after our conversation via IM. And the new version seems to have solved the problem too.

But, this is not the only example of me contacting a programs author with some difficulty or problem, and they re-looked at their program and/or code, and made some changes. Now, if you were using the most widespread Operating System in the world (i.e. MicroSoft) and other programs on it, do you honestly believe if you emailed a programs author with difficulties or problems that they would even answer you let alone change their program? From my experience, I think not!

Happy hollidays, everybody!

2004-12-25T20:41:00.000+02:00

I couldn't help it. Although I'm not a holliday person, I feel this was asked for, so: Merry X-Mas People!

And Happy Hanukkah!

I am sick

2004-12-22T20:14:00.000+02:00

And not in some metaphorical way. I am plain old sick.My throat hurts, and my eyes burn... And life sux in general... Oh well.

Today the branching of PyQLogger code was done. There is a stable-1.x branch, which was made of 1.3.3.0 code, and we'll use it for bug fix releases, if those will be needed.

The second branch is 2.0 - trunk. This is the testbed for new developments. It will take some time until the first beta of 2.0 is released... We have many ambitious plans for it. I already wrote a complete network async backend using QT's network modules, and Xander drawn and took time to describe the scheme for Multiple blogs and account. After that we have huge plans for new configurable and extendable plugins... And some other stuff.

Stay tuned!

Patching up.

2004-12-19T18:30:00.000+02:00

Mkay. The 1.3.3 was a fiasco on my side. It was rather popular (according to downloads), but very low-quality. I had to re-upload the tarball 3 times because of Major fuckups.

Today to address some more issues, and to add some clarity to the problems, I'm releasing 1.3.3.0 the first bug fix release. Most work here was done by Xander, he even tried to make my code look a bit cleaner. That will take much effort on his part :)

There ain't no major changes in this version,except proper command line handling. All other stuff are just bug fixes. It's highly recommended to upgrade.

For me, on the agenda for future releases are:

Make all network operations Qt aware, and add progress bars for them
Create a whole new plugin system, with lots and lots of new features :)

In other news... I've been fiddling with new MSN offerings, i.e. beta MSN Search, Desktop Search and MSN Spaces. Here are some thoughts:

I will not use Desktop Search. Period. I was very disappointed with Google Desktop, and I’m even more disappointed with MSN‘s. They are limited , unextendable and totally pointless for someone who’s not a Microsoft fan, meaning – I don’t use Internet Explorer, I don’t use MS Office, I don’t use MSN Messenger and god forbid, i DO NOT use any Outlooks. So basicly, MSN Desktop Search can’t find s**t for me!
I will try using MSN Search. It has some interesting results as an alternative to all mighty Google. The interface is very un-obtrusive and very un-microsoft ;) which is a good thing
I’ve setup a test Msn space to play around. The blog setup, and picture upload are awesome. The lack of template editing sucks. Many bugs (i.e profile showing doesn’t work). Works very badly in Linux and Firefox (oh god, what a surprise!). And doesn’t support Atom API – so it’s not interesting for me. At all.

Currently listening to: NAS - The Genesis
Ok. That's it for now, go get a fresh bugfix release, and play nice!

Cheers, reflog

1.3.3 Released!

2004-12-15T14:35:00.000+02:00

Good day.

Today we’ve release a major upgrade to PyQLogger. Here’s what changed:

New configuration system. The settings are stored in human readable INIformat. Fully backwards compatible. (Xander)
Optional KDE Support. If PyKDE is available, you’ll be treated to full-blown KHTML based post preview, tray icon and dcop interface. If not – nothing is changed. (thanks Detliev (eric3) for the idea)
Option QScintilla support. If QScintilla is available, it will be used instead of default ugly post editor. Antialiased fonts are bonus :)
PyQLogger is now more distribution friendly. It installs .desktop file, so now it should appear in Network menu in gnome/kde. Until we have a proper icon, I’m using kedit’s
Some minor bugfixes

Get the release from project’s home page and please take time to vote for it on Freshmeat.net

Some progress

2004-12-13T12:59:00.000+02:00

Good day!

First of all, here’s the progress on PyQLogger:

Kde is in. Tray Menu, KHTML Preview and DCOP. Fear!
QScintilla is in. Optional ofcourse. It’s transparent aswell.
Better fonts for editor control (hopefully this will work) with anti aliasing
New plain text, human readable config files, courtesy of Xander
Image insert dialog now supports upload and automatic thumbnail generation

And that’s it for now… Hopefully I’ll pack a 1.3.3 release today. We’ll see how it goes.

Now, in other news, I am starting to get scared of Google. They become to DARN good at what they do.

Their last spawn called Google Suggest is absolutly amazing.

Ofcourse, some one immidiatly wipped a fresh Python module called PyGoogleSuggest that will return a list of suggestions per word request. Amazing again.
The only thing that would make this even MORE amazing, is that if someone would be able to build this into Firefox's search bar. Oh yes!

Qt/Kde sweetness

2004-12-09T19:30:00.000+02:00

Coupla days ago a new snapshot of Eric3 was published. In it’s changelog I found an interesting line:

added some dialog wrappers that make eric use KDE dialogs, if
KDE and PyKDE are installed

And I was like – WTF? Why didn’t I think of that? So in a few minutes I was ripping through Eric’s code in frenzy. Ten minutes later – I had first results

Now, what does it mean for an end user? The following:

If you don’t have PyKDE or KDE installed – nothing will change. You won’t even notice the new features
If KHTML can be initialised, the ugly QTextBrowser used for preview is replaced with full blown KHtml based previewer.
If DCOP can be initialised, then the user get a very sweet remote control over PyQLogger¹
A very nice tray applet is added, with menu items for basic actions

I might add more as I come along…

¹ Here are the things you can do with DCOP at this point:





command: 
~~~~~~
dcop pyqlogger-28190 PyQLogger

result:
~~~~
QCStringList interfaces()
QCStringList functions()
void newpost()
void setPostTitle(QString)
QString getPostTitle()
QString getPostText()
void preview()
void setPostText(QStringList)

command:
~~~~~~
dcop pyqlogger-28190 PyQLogger getPostTitle

result:
Qt/Kde sweetness

And etc! Use your imagination

Busy day. Busy day!

2004-12-06T20:14:00.000+02:00

Oki doki. Finally some news!
The main reason for this update is Xander. His interest in PyQLogger revived my interest, and now you can reap the results
Here's what was done today:

New plugin created (together with Xander) to add ‘Now listening to..’ line to the post
New release complete 1.3.2 (visit the usual place)
A WiKi has been setup. I didn’t have much time to fill it with info, but pay it a visit anyway. It’s here.
The project was added to freshmeat, and now waiting to be announced!

Now how's that for one day? Anyway, more to come! Xander is working on new configuration system for PyQLogger, which will allow a human-readable config files, and maybe some per-plugin configuration, and I will do my best to finish the Image Upload thingie.

SuSe Packages.

2004-12-05T11:27:00.000+02:00

Couple of days ago, I've setup a Google-Alert for any new PyQLogger related pages, and today it came up with this:

Guru's RPM Site
Guru's RPM Site Home » Packages » Network » pyqlogger.

Someone by name of Pascal Bleser aka Guru, took his time to prepare SuSe packages for PyQLogger, PyOSD and FeedParser. Very cool!
If anyone prepares any more packages for other distros, I'll be more than happy to post them at BerliOS and announce here, but please keep me posted!

Some ramblings.

2004-12-02T19:49:00.000+02:00

Finally, the weekend nears! This week seemed like it wound never end... Oh well. Last week I wrote two interesting tools for one of my college courses, one is a pure Python implementation of GNU GetText. Extraction and replacemeny of localized strings and etc, and the other one is Digital Watermarking of executables. Written in Python aswell. (god, i love this language ) When I'll finish and submit those projects I'll publish them, with some sort of article, maybe someone will find them educational.
NB. The smiley added above was posted using my Smiley plugin for PyQLogger

Hmm... What else... Oh. I had a rather interesting experience with Linux distros lately. I've never considered myself a linux guru, but always thought that I find my way with any kind of linux machine. Lately I had to (don't ask why) install a Linux From Scratch type of distro. It was very educational... But... After you installed it, and became all smart and linux-savvy, you are left with barebone system, which needs to get filled somehow. So you try to compile some app. It requires 10 libs... You know the story. Anyway, there IS a certain reason why systems like RPM, APT and Portage where invented.

So, after compiling and downloading and compiling and downloading... I decided - fuck em. So i went and did an interesting trick. I installed Portage over my LFS. With help from Gentoo's forums, It took me 2 hours to create a fresh working almost-gentoo system. Sweet!

Minor PyQLogger release 1.3.1

2004-12-02T18:29:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to notify those who are interested, that a new minor release of PyQLogger is available :) This one has new plugin called Smiley Add, and two new dialogs - Insert Image and Insert Url.
Insert Image is not complete yet, but basic functionality is already there.
More info about the new plugin (it's rather cool...) can be found it README_PLUGINS file.

Cheers.
P.S. Oh yeah. It can be found here: PyQLogger Project Page

Small updates

2004-12-01T11:42:00.000+02:00

Good day!
One fellow Pythoner and Blogger by name of Xander Soldaat did some nice patching and feature adding on PyQLogger which made me want to work a little bit on the project again. It's the guilt. I can't take it :)
Anyway, I will be preparing new release soon with the features added by Xander and myself, which include two new dialogs for adding Urls and Images, plus I think to add a Smiley plugin...
Btw, if u use this PyQLogger for your blog, please consider adding this button:

I know that it's ugly, but i have absolutely NO artistic skills :(

More GMail news!

2004-11-16T13:14:00.000+02:00

I am as usual excited about the stuff Google folks are bringing us:

Just launched!
It's your mail. You should be able to choose how and where you read it. Access your mail the way you want to, with free POP access and automatic forwarding. You can even switch to other email services without having to worry about losing access to your messages. Think of it as email portability.

Free POP access
Download your messages. Read them offline. Use your Blackberry or Outlook or just the good ol' web. Learn more

Free automatic forwarding
Forward new incoming messages to any email account you specify. Learn more

Plugin Pack

2004-11-08T12:23:00.000+02:00

Good day.
Today I've packaged and uploaded the promissed plugin pack for PyQLogger.
It can be found at BerliOS

Have fun, and do read the Installation instructions for the package.

PyQLogger 1.3

2004-11-07T11:20:00.000+02:00

Oki Dokie. Finnaly got some time to package and release PyQLogger 1.3.
It's available at the usual places - PyPI and BerliOS.
The plugin pack will be packaged today aswell, and I'll post it to BerliOS at the evening (hopefully).

Cheers.

Slowdown to a stop

2004-11-02T13:19:00.000+02:00

I am really sorry for lack of updates on the blog lately, but I'm having some really tought times at the work and Real Life (tm) takes it's toll.
I promiss to package up the last version of PyQLogger sometimes soon, and for those who cannot wait - there's always a Subversion repository at BerliOS page.
Take care.

Pre Release

2004-10-21T20:37:00.000+02:00

Mkay. I think PyQLogger 1.3 is pretty ready to be realsed to public. I'll run it tomorrow for a while, and then prepare a build.

I will also package the PyQLogger Plugin package, which for now only contains SpellChecker, but later will include SmileyAdd, Tagline and ImageUpload plugins.

The most annoying thing at this point is the Syntax Highlighting in the editor... It works VERY bad, and I just don't have the energy to fix it. I will. Someday :)
Anyway, for the 1.3.1 release I will prepare the Backup/Restore feature, and build it into the GUI.

Logo

2004-10-20T01:25:00.000+02:00

Hello again. I was thinking... And I know that this is a long shot, but... Maybe someone is willing to make a logo for PyQLogger? I think it's time to make an about dialog, and I have nothing shiny for it :)
So, if you posses any art skills, be my guest, any form would be just fine, and I'd be very grateful!

Plugins and SpellChecker

2004-10-20T01:17:00.000+02:00

Ok. I've managed to whip up a simple plugin system for toolbars. It allows the creation of primitive actions (like the Tags buttons) by using just one method (Factory-like), and also subclassing and creating separate modules in plugins/ directory.

All tag buttons are already became plugins, for things to be more general...
Anh, oh yes, here's a teaser, a screen shot from brand spanking new Spell Checker, which uses ASpell as a backend. It's rather raw for now, but It's usable already :)

PyQLogger progress

2004-10-17T20:21:00.000+02:00

Hi there. The work on PyQLogger is still on. I plan to squash main bugs and implement my basic requested set of features before I release 1.3. Until now there were this changes:

- Fixed the hanging of the application after GUI exit
+ Added first draft of Unicode support (post works, fetching does not)
* Web browser for preview now is opened correctly thru webbrowser.py module
+ In AtomBlog added getPost function
+ Blog Backup util started (see previous post)

What does bother me, though, is the Unicode problem. When I post an entry with mixed encoded material (i tried russian and hebrew), it get's posted just great, but in response I get ????? symbols instead of letters. Very discouraging. Ideas anyone?

Blogger backup tool

2004-10-15T18:41:00.000+02:00

To address the request from this blog's visitor, I'm working on a little tool to accompany PyQLogger. It can be used to backup and restore blogs posts. You supply it your blog's homepage (which is used to get links to archive pages), blogid, username,password (they are used to get the posts) and it parses the pages, gets posts id's, and then stores it all into a file.

Afterwards you can use it's Restore mode to publish all the posts from this file to some other blog. For now it's a command line tool, but I plan to add a gui for it, so you can choose what posts to backup/restore for easier batch mode. After the GUI is made, I'll add it to PyQLogger.

Here's a sample output from the tool:

Blogger backup/restore tool v0.1 by Reflog
>>> Getting archives from http://XXX/
+ Got 2 archives...
>>> Parsing http://XXX_archive.html
+ Got 2 posts
>>> Parsing http://XXX_archive2.html
+ Got 6 posts
>>> Getting posts' content...
* Post ID:109592965255358780
* Post ID:109584571770849575
* Post ID:109757610707240154
* Post ID:109757589840720876
* Post ID:109757582631207808
* Post ID:109679815617951163
* Post ID:109688115038667795
* Post ID:109688037090822849
>> Done!
!!! Content saved to file:1

I'll post first draft of the tool soon.

BerliOS

2004-10-14T11:06:00.000+02:00

Good day, all.
Well, I aint sure, but I do think I found a perfect host for my project, and BerliOS. They have all the features that I've needed and did not get at Savannah. The project can be found at: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/pyqlogger/
I've already setup a mailing list, you can add bug reports and feature requests, there are forums, public ftp, Subversion AND CVS, PHP and MySQL, and other nifty things, including a WiKi :)
So far I am VERY pleased. Pay them a visit, very nifty and liberal place.

Hosting woes

2004-10-12T12:44:00.000+02:00

Arrgh! I am heavily irritated!
Savannah hosting proved itself to be a rather bad choice for me. There are several reasons for saying that:

No mailing lists available
Most cumbersome upload system which made me want to pull my hair out
Un-working tasks system
Odd way of managing a webpage
No php/mysql to keep a normal webpage

Anyway, today I will sign up for BerliOS and see what they have to offer, then maybe move there. For now, Ive updated a link in PyPI to point to my old hosting, please you it, instead of Savannah, until I settle my hosting problems.

New PyQLogger release!

2004-10-12T12:23:00.000+02:00

Theres a new version available: 1.2.1, which was planned to be just a bugfix release, but incorporated some really nice new features and changes aswell.
Here is a quote from changelog:

+ Added new version notification
+ Added icon to the window
* Changed taborder in wizard
+ Wrote first test case for AtomBlog (see blog for link)
+ Added export feature for posts
- Cleaned up the BG module. Less code now, no notify() method.
- Minor bugs fixed
* Changed the settings format. Its incompatible with previous version.
Sorry, but it was needed, since previous format did not allow the user to store list of posts for multiple blogs.
* Changed the UI to represent the ability to control multiple blogs

The 1.3 version will be next major update, with toolbar plugins

As usual the release can be found at Savannah and PyPI

Savannah Project

2004-10-06T19:25:00.000+02:00

I've decided that to keep track of all the crap I'm dumping into this project I'll need a CVS repository.
Usually I immidiatly think 'Sourceforge' when such thing arises, but since my last fiasco with them (I had to re-submit my project proposal two times for Shlogger, and it still got rejected, they require like 2 page project specification... What the heck? This stuff is for fun - let's keep it this way!) I was looking for other options.
I came across this place and in two days I had a project approved. And although they don't have shell access, they have all other perks like CVS, tracker and mailing lists. Suits me!

So the link is [here]

GMail new features

2004-10-06T18:53:00.000+02:00

Google folks have been hard at work. To quote:

Some features we know you've wanted (and one we should have had all along):

Gmail Notifier Want to know if you've got new mail? Let us do the checking so you don't have to. Find out when new messages arrive, and even see their subjects, senders and snippets, all without having to open a web browser.

Search your contacts With the new and improved Contacts list, search for a contact as easily as you would a message in Gmail. Add notes and phone numbers. View messages directly from the Contacts list. Stay in touch with the people in your life more easily than ever before.

Automatic forwarding to another email account We're testing a new feature that lets you forward new incoming messages to any email account you want. It's free during the test and you can set it up in seconds. Even set up filters to forward only some of your messages. It's your mail. Get it the way you want it.

And finally... Save Drafts! For when you can't find the right words, save drafts and find them later.

Weepie!

2004-10-05T10:30:00.000+02:00

Congratulations to me! :)
I didn't think this would happen, but it did - my blog had crossed the 1000 visitors landmark! Hurray!

PyQLogger v1.2

2004-10-04T11:19:00.000+02:00

Ok. One more little update. Some more cleaning up. Here's a quote once more:

Post editing is fixed

Post publishing made async aswell

Not mentioned in previous entry:

The 'delete' button was removed from the form. Now deleteing a post is done thru popup menu on items.

The 'new' button was moved to main toolbar instead of some unknown blank one :)

License notice added to the modules

XmlTramp was removed and now only FeedParser is used

Get it from PyPI

AtomBlog Unit test

2004-10-04T10:51:00.000+02:00

The unit test for AtomBlog module can be found at this location
If anyone has suggestions on better way of unit-testing such online modules, step right up!

PyQLogger updated

2004-10-01T20:58:00.000+02:00

I've made few beautifications to PyQLogger and prepared a proper (hopefully) release.
If anyone gets their hands on it please report if you had success using it.
Here's a quote from changelog:

Second try on the fist version.

Modules moved to separated dir

Added a script to correctly execute the app

Fixed and improved the packaging

Included the GPL license

Added WhatsThis to most of GUI items

Added accelerators to most items

Fixed some major fuckups in the code

Prepared translation file. (though it's not used yet)

Some PyThoughts

2004-09-30T21:46:00.000+02:00

Sup.
After releasing PyQLogger I've reached the following conclusions:

Python community is very active. The release had drawn 200 hits to my blog in one day, wheres my Shlogger release on GotDotNet brought one person :) This is very comforting and encouraging
None of the people who came to the blog (or snached the release from PyPI) have actually tried using it :) Or maybe they tried, failed, and didn't care enough to report bugs to me. How do I know that? Well, after coming home, and reopening the release, I realized that there were about 5 very critical bugs, and few annoying ones. Plus I forgot to make a normal startup file, so the users had to guess and execute MainForm_Impl. Very unproffesional on my side, but it was just a first try. (not only at packaging. this is really my first Python program and first ever GUI program under Linux)
Coding is fun, getting response for your work is even more fun - too bad that didn't happen.
In next two days I'll prepare a cleaner, proper release 1.1 with all the fixes.
Thanks to David Boddie from PyKDE mailing list, I will provide a more fine-tuned Syntax Highlighting aswell. I've dropped QScintilla to minimize dependancies as much as possible. (I'm still dreaming on porting this thing back to *NDOWS)

PyQLogger 1.0 Released!

2004-09-28T12:17:00.000+02:00

To make news short: PyPI: PyQLogger 1.0
Name: PyQLogger
Version: 1.0
Author: reflog
Author email: reflog at gmail com
Home page: http://yukelzon.blogspot.com/
Download URL: http://reflog.nxt.ru/PyQLogger-1.0.tar.gz
Summary: PyQLogger: PyQt Blogger Client
Description: PyQT Client for Blogger.com usign Atom API. Requires pyosd, pyqt Uses xmltramp, feedparser

And a link

Little changes

2004-09-23T21:32:00.000+02:00

Sup. Just wanted to drop a few lines here...

First of all I've added a link to www.blogspot.com since I'm using this awesome service myself now, and think anyone who's into reading blogs MUST see it.

To represent my new interest in Python I've changed the Blog's description :)

And to those who consider trying this language I highly suggest two tools.

First is an IDE called Eric3 and could be found here. It's way better than some commercial IDEs I've tried, very fast and has full support for PyQT.

Another tool is IPython. It's an interactive Python shell, which is highly useful when you want to try snippets of code and just browse class-structure. Two thumbs up. You can find it here

Py!

2004-09-23T17:12:00.000+02:00

Some more notes:

There will be no WYSIWYG editing in PyQLogger. Period. I ate enough shit with it in Shlogger.
The will be syntax color editor. I'm using QScintilla for it. Awesome.
All plugin buttons will get a separate Toolbar page
All plugins and toolbar items will get a separate copy in context menu
OSD messages are done. yeppie.

PyQLogger Screenshot

2004-09-23T15:26:00.000+02:00

PyQLogger Screenshot
Originally uploaded by Eli Yukelzon.

Mkay, Here's how it looks like. Pretty, eh? I think it looks better than Shlogger. Plus I plan not to add StatusBar, but instead display all messages in OnScreenDisplay. Nifty.

1..2..3 Is this on?

2004-09-23T14:47:00.000+02:00

Howdy.

If all goes well, this would be the first post from my new toy called PyQLogger, which is basicly a Shlogger rewrite in Python and QT. The core is already usable, and I am quite please with it. What is completly missing at this point is the plugin system, which will be done differently than in Shlogger.

I'll post the first screenshot soon.
Cheers.

Firefox - spread the fire!

2004-09-22T10:13:00.000+02:00

I've decided to give a hand to an awesome http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ campaign. I'm a heavy supporter of this great browser and wish all the luck to it's developers!

Mono is dull

2004-09-15T22:03:00.000+03:00

Yeah, ok, I knew this would happen... To quote my self:

This is very ambitious since I haven't written a single app in Gtk, but this could be a nice challenge. Most likely my enthusiasm will die down soon, but it's worth a shot.

So anyway, I've wrote like 10 pages of Mono/Gtk/Glade/Linux/Windows tutorial with all the details that I've came across and the just said to my self - FUCK IT.

It's not interesting.
Not exciting.
Very bad for mental health.
And why the hell am I doing it?

I am officially off Mono. Until it's a complete port of .NET over to Linux, I am NOT touching it. That's it.

The tutorial plan is off, and I viciously removed Mono from all my PCs, and it felt... Well, rather liberating

But, since I cannot stay with no project at hand, I threw myself at Python. It's a very interesting alternative to my all-time favorite Perl. It allow to write a very neat and clean code, has very object oriented design, and (a BIG plus for me) has a nifty set of IDEs and toolkits created for it. Anyway, right now I am porting Perl's module Term::Shell to Python. They have a similar module in the distribution called cmd.py but it's very function-limited and doesn't have all the features of the latter. So I've converted all the code (I like learning new languages this way) and now busy bug-squashing

So, expect more from me, rambling on this new toy of mine

Nother Shlogger plugin

2004-09-15T21:52:00.000+03:00

Oki. Today decided to revive Shlogger a little, so I've made a little additional plugin, called Taglines.

It allows to add some one-liner to the post's body. For now I've added 3 types of taglines:

WMP/iTunes Listening to
Foobar Listening to
Random Quote

And now to show off, here it is:

Now listening to: Royce Da 5'9 - [Death Is Certain #08] Gangsta Ft. Cutty Mack

So, there it is.

A Domain

2004-09-14T09:36:00.000+03:00

Howdy. I've received a nice offer, so now this blog can be reached at this shortcut: www.reflog.info Nifty, eh?

GMail

2004-09-05T13:00:00.000+03:00

Ok. To keep the flood of post in blogsphere about Gmail i'll post my 2c on the issue.

1st. Thumbs Up

a) Speed. Overall performance of the site is REALLY impressive. The whole open post/read/archive process is lightning fast. Flipping through messages is a breese. Plus, no un-needed graphic buttons/ads/crap, so everything loads very smoothly.

b) Interface. Finally a real exploitation of the DHTML in webmail! Address auto-completion is absolutely beautiful, the Spell Checker is really sweet (and keyboard controlled), the Grouped Conversation view is just perfect for keeping all corespondence relevant intact. A+

c) Size. Well. 1GB. Nough Said.

d) Ads. Can't beleive I'm voting for this, but... The AdSense in GMail is just awesome. It's probably the only type of advertisment I've seen on the web that I didn't add to my AdBlock list :) Having information directly linked to the mail I receive is an awesome advantage. And to those weirdos talking about gmail-is-too-creepy and etc... Open your eyes! Every mail you get is run through your ISP, or through Hotmail or any other webservice. The only reason nobody is talking about 'mails being screened' is because nobody knows! If the 'Big Brother' would want to read your mails... They would. So relax. The only way GMail is different from any other webmail in this sense, is that it visualizes the fact that mails are open ;)

e) Tools. Not really Gmail's 'fault', but... The geeks re-united and created lots of nifty tools. The main one I'm using is the GMail notifier extension for Firefox. Absolutely sweet.

f) Geekness. Gmail is uber-cool right now. The whole invitation thingie was a perfect publicity stunt (I think that was the main reason, not the beta-trial). Every geek on the planet has to catch a good name on GMail. Ph34r.

2nd. Thumbs Down

a) No HTML Mailing. Right now you can only create messages in plain text.

b) Un-Clear Spam checking. The way of spam recognition is very vague, plus when you select a mail as spam, it goes to 'Probable Spam' list, instead of being thrown into trash.

c) Annoying 'Delete'. Gmail's policy about the 'Delete' function is really obtrusive. "Never delete your mail. Archive, don't delete" and etc. It takes WAY too many steps to delete a mail. This is annoying.

d) Plain Filtering. Filtering system is VERY raw and VERY basic. What I would REALLY want to see here is implementation of something like an awesome open source project called POPFile, which uses Baysian learning system to automatically filter your mail, according to previous studing period. I've added this suggestion to GMail, but unfortunatly I seriously doubt that they will consider it.

Anyway, generally, I'm a happy camper and trying to move all my mail to my GMail account. Plus, having some invites, I'm starting to get my buds hooked aswell.

I sencirly hope that GMail will not stop at it's current state, and will utilize all the feedback from beta-testers to make it even better than now.

Cheers.

GMail baby!

2004-08-29T20:33:00.000+03:00

Wheepie! A pure soul of Steve Eichert shared a GMail invite with me!

Now I join the ranks of wackos rambling about this nifty thingie. Already setted up a Firefox extension for monitoring the account. Neat.

A promissed slowdown

2004-08-25T11:46:00.000+03:00

As i've promissed, the posting to the blog has gone down hill. Main reason for this is - I'm back at work. So, less fun, more crap. :) Anyway, I'm still working on the paper that I've promissed (the one about Glade and Mono) and I hope it will be ready in a few days. Btw, if anyone is acutally reading this - does anyone know ANY decent blogger posting tools for *NIX ? Hello?

Site Updates

2004-08-17T16:12:00.000+03:00

Well, as you can obviously see, the site's template was changed. Why? I dunno, just liked this one better. I've also changed the page's font, which looks much more readable (as far as I can see).

Oh, before I forget: there is one more feature that needs to be added to Shlogger: pre-publish plugin activization. Ahh, I love those long, technical names. Anyway, for plugin like speller, it could be set to check the post before publishing, and for plugin like Smiley , it can parse the text and change all the ":)" to and etc. The only problem is - this feature will demand some sort of configuration UI for the plugins, which I tried to avoid. We'll see.

Another Shlogger Plugin

2004-08-17T16:08:00.000+03:00

After my victory over file uploading yesterday , today I've finished the oh-so-needed (for me) ImageUpload plugin for Shlogger! It replaces the usual IE 'Add Image Dialog' and allows the following:

Add link to image (with optional thumb image and alt description)
Upload image to ImageArk webhost
Upload image to ImageShack webhost

For the latter two, the thumbnail can be generated and uploaded. Border adding and alignment are supported. All in all I am very pleased

File Uploading

2004-08-16T15:51:00.000+03:00

Well, this has to be, by far, the ugliest piece of code I've ever written, but... it works. :) I've been struggling with file uploading for a while, but now it's done. Here's the function that will upload an image to ImageArk and return result HTML. Have fun.

static string FileUpload(string url, string referer, string filename)

{

Random r = new Random();

string randStr = r.Next().ToString();

string dataBoundary = "--xyz"+ randStr;

HttpWebRequest Req =(HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);

Req.UserAgent = "Upload Test";

Req.ContentType = "multipart/form-data; boundary=xyz"+randStr;

Req.Method = "POST";

Req.KeepAlive = true;

byte[] FileData = File.ReadAllBytes(filename);

StringBuilder DataString = new StringBuilder();

StringBuilder DataString2 = new StringBuilder();

DataString.Append(dataBoundary + "\r\n");

DataString.Append("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"userfile\"; filename=\"File1.jpg\"\r\n");

DataString.Append("Content-Length: " + FileData.Length.ToString() + "\r\n");

DataString.Append("Content-Type: image/jpeg\r\n\r\n");

byte[] tmpPostdata1 = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(DataString.ToString());

DataString2.Append(dataBoundary + "\r\n\r\n");

DataString2.Append("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"MAX_FILE_SIZE\"\r\n\r\n512000\r\n\r\n");

DataString2.Append(dataBoundary + "--\r\n");

byte[] tmpPostdata2 = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(DataString2.ToString());

byte[] t = new byte[tmpPostdata1.Length + FileData.Length + tmpPostdata2.Length];

tmpPostdata1.CopyTo(t, 0);

FileData.CopyTo(t,tmpPostdata1.Length);

tmpPostdata2.CopyTo(t, tmpPostdata1.Length + FileData.Length);

Req.ContentLength = t.Length;

Req.Referer = referer;

Stream tempStream = Req.GetRequestStream();

tempStream.Write(t,0,t.Length);

tempStream.Close();

HttpWebResponse Resp = (HttpWebResponse)Req.GetResponse();

//Read the raw HTML from the request

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(Resp.GetResponseStream(),

Encoding.Default);

//Convert the stream to a string

string s = sr.ReadToEnd();

sr.Close();

Resp.Close();

return s;

}

GladeSync

2004-08-15T21:24:00.000+03:00

As I've mentioned in previous post, I've found a nifty Glade util. I had to rewrite it a bit to suit my needs. If anyone interested, here it is (look in the comments)

I'm Stereo (Not MONO)

2004-08-15T19:55:00.000+03:00

OK. Apparently I overestimated myself (as usual). There are some things that mortal men cannot archive - for example : writing a full-blown application with MONO and current GUI toolkits for it. In past two days I've crawled through numerous projects: wx.NET , Gtk# , UIML.Net and even #Fox. The latter two are out of the question because I am just not willing to design a complete application by hand with no GUI Designer at hand. No, thank you . The wx.NET is not appealing for me because of two reasons:

It's way too much like MFC. It's previous century! Why the heck would anyone want to use MACROS for events? It's 2004 for crying out loud!
The wxDesigner. The most cumbersome GUI editor I've ever seen! Un-bearable! And to top it off, it's also missing a XYSizer, and allows only Grid like form designing, which is not so suitable for most things.

So, what's left? Gtk# . It seems like the most flexible and the most developed out of the bunch. But still, using GLADE to develop a cute looking app is just too overwhelming task for me.

So, dropping the whole cross-platform idea? Yes, and no. I will not rewrite Shlogger for Mono. Not until they come up with System.Windows.Forms support. BUT. What I am planning to do is the following: while I've been cruising the web for Gtk# information I came to a very sad conclusion: there's really little of it! The only thing that can be referenced as a good source is MONO Handbook. It has a lot of examples ready and waiting to be pasted into the code. Another interesting thing I found was this Ray's blog which had some interesting GLADE info. You might want to check it out. So I though - how about giving something back for a change ? So what I will do is write a complete tutorial on creating a cross platform application using C#, Mono, GTK# and GLADE. The topic for application that I've selected is Comics Fetcher. Yes, I know, VERY original, but what the heck? Anyhow, I will probably be getting back to programing under Linux soon, so the cross-platform thingie will be tested there as well.

OK. Enough rambling for now, let's get back to business!

Updates slowdown

2004-08-13T14:28:00.000+03:00

Howdy. Well, the updates on the Shlogger project will get a slowdown in the near future for the following reason - it's done. It works like I want it to, and has all the needed features. I've made a workspace with all the sources and will probably build a test release, but I doubt that anyone will use it, since it's written in beta c# 2.0 , but what the heck?

Anyhow, there are some changes:

I've added an About Dialog, which can be run from the System Menu (I didn't want to clutter the main interface with such unneeded feature)
The tree view was changed to ListView. The dates of the posts are displayed next to the posts now, which is pretty. This change had opened up quite a few bugs, but all are small and I will squash them soon
Since all the features are complete I'm thinking about something quite different to do with the project - Port It to MONO. This is very ambitious since I haven't written a single app in Gtk, but this could be a nice challenge. Most likely my enthusiasm will die down soon, but it's worth a shot.

I've GotDotNet :)

2004-08-10T18:22:00.000+03:00

Ok. Due to the request from my anonymous reader I've setted up a GotDotNet workspace today for Shlogger. I'm uploading all the stuff just now. Once again, I do not recomend using this as a working posting app, but more of an educational thingie (if you manage to learn anything from this junk )

The url is: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/shlogger