Simeon Franklin

PyBay 2017

PyBay, the Bay Area regional Python Conference is happening again August 10th-13th. See pybay.com for tickets and keep reading to find out why you shouldn't miss it.

Posted August 1st, 2017 in Programming Python Recommends (Comment)

PyBay - A Bay Area Mini-PyCon

PyBay is almost upon us!

Lately I've been cranking hard with the team at SF Python Meetup under our fearless leader Grace. PyBay, the Bay Area mini-PyCon is just two weeks away!

We have a shockingly good line up of speakers including Armin Ronacher, Andrew Godwin, Wes McKinney & Jessica McKellar. We even have a pre-conference tutorial track - and how often do you get the opportunity to take a class from Raymond Hettinger?

In fact the only thing we're missing is you. I hope you grab a ticket and I'll see you there!

Posted August 9th, 2016 in Python (Comment)

Python for Beginners: Pyglet

sfpythonmeetup - continues to rock hard! At our most recent project night we had an intermediate level class on the new asyncio module in Python 3.4 (thanks to the great Aaron Maxwell), an advanced class on datamicroscopes (non-parametric bayesian analysis library), a Pyramid tutorial and many many happy Pythonistas got to talk to experienced mentors about their Python questions.

Posted August 21st, 2014 in Python (Comment)

SF Python Project Night Class Material

SF Python Meetup has regular Project Nights. We welcome hackers and people working on their personal projects but it has been my aim to provide an opportunity for beginners in the Python community to take a class or just ask questions in a friendly, low-stress environment. I'm always recruiting mentors so if you're interested in helping out and haven't been before just hit me up on Twitter!

Posted June 9th, 2014 in Python (Comment)

PyCon Startup Row Pitch Event at Twitter

I am happy to announce that next Wednesday, February the 19th, Twitter will be hosting a PyCon Startup Evening. If you're a Python-related startup in the Bay Area please see the event page to sign up to pitch. The winner of the evening as voted by the audience using Twitter + a panel of judges will win a booth in PyCon 2014's Startup Row! Come on out and enjoy food and beverages with the Bay Area Python/Startup community!

Posted February 13th, 2014 in Python (Comment)

Python 3 Panel Discussion: Good idea?

I tweeted this idea but found I needed more than 140 chars to explain. In light of recent discussions from Alex Gaynor and Armin Ronacher - should we have a Python 3 panel discussion sfpythonmeetup.com? Contact me if you'd like to participate in the panel or to tell me it's a horrible idea.

Posted January 26th, 2014 in Python (Comment)

Giving Thanks

The biggest side project I've had this last year has been organizing the SF Python Meetup. The year has been a resounding sucess for the meetup. We've met consistently 1-2 times per month since PyCon. We expanded our meetings to provide a "Project Night" experience as well as our traditional talk nights and we've seen the community gain many new and diverse faces. I've taken enormous personal satisfaction from the very many people new to the Python community who have enjoyed themselves and learned something to at our project nights. And of course the talk nights have continued to feature high quality talks on interesting topics as evidenced by the usual attendance counts of ~200.

I'd like to take the occasion of the Holiday to give thanks for all this Python goodness!

Posted November 28th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

Descriptors Talk at SF Python

Last week I gave one of the talks at our monthly SF Python Meetup talks night. Our theme was Python Magic and we had a great talk by Jess Hamrick on metaclasses and I talked about descriptors. There was a bunch of advanced Python knowledge laid down and we had good Q&A from the approximately 150 attendees afterwards.

Posted November 17th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

@contextmanager lightning talk video

Evan over at the NewCircle was nice enough to post the video of my lightning talk on @contextlib.contextmanager from a couple months ago. The video is embedded below - I only see one or two mistakes! Not bad for 30 minutes of slide prep in a busy day!

Posted September 29th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

Goodby To Marakana

There are big changes afoot in my life. You might already have seen the news - the training company that I work for has been acquired by Twitter to help launch a new initiative at Twitter dubbed Twitter University. Marko and Sasa Gargenta, my bosses here at Markana are now leading that initiative and I'll be working with them at twitter.

Posted August 14th, 2013 in (Comment)

@contextmanagers Lightning Talk at SF Python Meetup

Last night we had a full house for Tom Hatch discussing his project Salt at SF Python Meetup. Salt seems like an interesting technology - more interesting than just a better chef/puppet! I'm looking forwards to digging into it.

Posted July 11th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

Django Tips, Tricks and a bit of Python Magic

I recently talked at USF for the guest lectures in Computer Science series. They were interested in a beginner-oriented talk about Django or a talk about cool features in Python.... so I did both! The video for the talk is available on Marakana Stream and here are the slides as well - just hit space to advance the slides.

Posted July 11th, 2013 in Django Python (Comment)

Welcoming Beginners in the San Francisco Community

I enjoy the regular SF Python Meetup nights. We feature awesome speakers deep-diving cool Python technologies (seriously: next up is Thomas Hatch talking Salt Stack on July 10th). Lately, however, Grace, Hy and I have been trying to figure out how to be more welcoming to the beginners in the Bay Area's Python community.

Posted June 30th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

Higher Order Functions in Python

I'm teaching a virtual class right now and with a week break thought a refresher video for my students was in order. If you've ever wanted to learn to use sorted/map/filter/reduce and friends in Python - watch on. (20 minute video after the jump).

Posted June 17th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

Google IO Talks Mini-Review

I'm at Google IO blogging the talks I go to...

Posted May 16th, 2013 in Programming Technology (Comment)

Python/Django Talk tonight at USF in San Francisco

All are welcome tonight @ 6:30 at the University of San Francisco in the Kudlick Classroom (Harney Science Center 235) where I'll be presenting for the Special Lectures series for the Computer Science department there.

Please see the Special Lecture Series schedule for details. My talk is titled Django - Tips, Tricks and a dash of Python Magic. I'll be giving a brief overview of the fundamental pieces of the framework, a quick run-through of essential 3rd party Django apps, and discussion of advanced Python language features we can use to make our code more ~~Djangoic~~ ~~Djangoish~~ ~~Djangoical~~ like the rest of the Django code we use.

Posted April 17th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

PyCon 2013 Poster Video is up!

My video interview from the PyCon 2013 Poster session is up!

Posted April 17th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

My PyCon 2013 Poster

Just getting this up quickly in response to the very enthusiastic responses I received today at PyCon. Nobody yelled at me! (Guido did frown a bit though.) And very many of you came to tell me the same two things:

I agree.
What can I do to help?

I'll have more to say - both in explaining my ideas and in answering that second question - but in the meantime I just wanted to put up my poster for those who asked (warning: 1mb .pdf). Thanks again to everyone who stopped by my poster to chat. If you just can't wait to begin the conversation (or you didn't get a chance to yell at me!) I can be reached on twitter @simeonfranklin or via email (simeon at marakana dot com).

Posted March 17th, 2013 in Python (Comment)

Modesto Scripting Language Meetup API Mashups

Recently the Modesto Scripting Language Meetup had another hack night. The theme of the meetup was Twilio apps and API's in general. We had presentations on Twilio and the Meetup REST API.

Posted January 3rd, 2013 in Programming (Comment)

Ask an Expert - I'm wising up

After discovering that I was answering somebody else's test questions for them yesterday I'm less likely to answer questions like:

McDonald’s sells Chicken McNuggets in packages of 6, 9 or 20 McNuggets. Thus, it is possible, for example, to buy exactly 15 McNuggets (with one package of 6 and a second package of 9), but it is not possible to buy exactly 16 McNuggets, since no non- negative integer combination of 6's, 9's and 20's add up to 16. To determine if it is possible to buy exactly n McNuggets, one has to find non-negative integer values of a, b, and c such that 6a + 9b + 20c = n

Posted November 3rd, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Ask an Expert - Interlacing Strings

I get random questions from the internet… I hate to be helping people with their homework or interview questions - but sometimes the questions are fun! A commenter writes:

I have to write a code in python to concatenate two strings together, by successively alternating elements of each string (starting with the first character of s1). If one string is longer than the other, then the remaining elements of the longer string should simply be added at the end of the new string. For example, if we lace abcd and efghi, we would get the new string:'aebfcgdhi'.

Ok! Let’s tackle this problem a couple of different ways.

Posted November 2nd, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Scheduling Tasks in Python

A student wrote in to ask about using the sched module to schedule re-occurring tasks at a particular time of day in Python. Here's what I came up with...

Posted August 14th, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Using Django's Multiple Database Support

In a recent Django class one of my students posed the problem she was learning Django to tackle - she would be responsible for writing a web-based administrative interface to a database whose structure she wasn't allowed to modify. Can Django do that?

Absolutely - and Django even comes with a management command to bootstrap working with a legacy database. Let's create a brand new project, use a popular sample database as our target, and using Django's multi-db support to store Django's built-in model data in a separate database.

Posted August 13th, 2012 in Django Python (Comment)

Understanding Python Decorators in 12 Easy Steps!

Ok, perhaps I jest. As a Python instructor decorators are a topic I find students consistently struggle with upon first exposure. That’s because decorators are hard to understand! Getting decorators requires understanding several functional programming concepts as well as feeling comfortable with some unique features of Python’s function definition and function calling syntax.

I can’t make decorators easy - but maybe by walking through each piece of the puzzle one step at a time I can help you feel more confident in understanding decorators[1]. Because decorators are complex this is going to be a long article - but stick with it! I promise to make each piece as simple as possible - and if you understand each piece, you’ll understand how decorators work!

Posted July 1st, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Javascript The Good Parts Talk

Modesto Scripting Languages Meetup is up to 22 members and 4 consecutive meetups!

Posted June 4th, 2012 in Programming (Comment)

What Generators are for

I teach Python classes and enjoy exploring language features from the perspective of newbie's to the language. Usually I can explain the rationale for Python language features by showing a compelling use case. But what about generator functions?

Posted May 22nd, 2012 in Programming Python (Comment)

Short tutorial on Django and Celery

I filmed a short tutorial on setting up a developer config of Celery with Django. Celery lets you call Python functions as asynchronous tasks, to be run by a separate process. Production usage of Celery involves installing a queue service of some kind (RabbitMQ, etc) but for development use it is possible to just use the Django ORM to store tasks in the database and run the celery daemon as a program in the foreground ala Django's runserver command. Video after the jump...

Posted April 26th, 2012 in Django Python (Comment)

Top 10 Rookie Mistakes in PHP

At the most recent Modesto Scripting Languages Meetup I presented a talk on the Top 10 Rookie Mistakes in PHP.

Posted April 26th, 2012 in Programming (Comment)

Fernando Perez and IPython at Baypiggies

Fernando Perez will be presenting at Baypiggies this coming Thursday (7:30 at Symantec Mountain View on Apr 19th, 2012). I'm a big fan of IPython and really enjoyed the IPython sessions I sat in @ PyCon2012 - come by and pick up IPython tips that will make you a more productive programmer daily!

Posted April 12th, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Getting started with Jython

A student in my Python Fundamentals class asked me to demonstrate how to get started with Jython - this is what I could figure out in 30 minutes...

Posted April 4th, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Pycon 2012

PyCon 2012 rocks. Dancing robots! Great tutorials, great talks, and 2,200+ Pythonistas!

Posted March 9th, 2012 in Python (Comment)

List Comprehensions for Modesto Scripting Languages Meetup

Monday night we had our second Modesto Scripting Languages Meetup. This was our first presentations-style meeting and all the presenters did a great job - James did a live demo of building a simple app in web.py, Nathan covered the MVC pattern in web applications and I talked about list processing generally and list comprehensions in Python specifically.

Posted March 2nd, 2012 in Python (Comment)

Data Visualization with pyprocessing talk

Last Thursday I presented at Baypiggies. I have to say this was not one of my most polished presentations ever - I volunteered at the last minute when we didn't have a speaker. I had started a talk on the port of Processing to Python for PyCon and hadn't finished my sample programs or the talk structure when I didn't make the cut for PyCon. But taking my own advice not to waste a rejection I (sorta) finished up my talk in the couple of days before Baypiggies and filled in. Read More to see the slides and source code for the talk.

Posted February 28th, 2012 in Programming Python (Comment)

That's me, Python Expert

This is actually an announcement after the fact, but I am now a full time Python instructor for Marakana. Yes, my official job title is now Expert and instead of working as a freelance programmer I teach other programmers how to transition to Python. This has been a huge but welcome shift for me! Let me explain how I got here.

Posted February 14th, 2012 in Programming Python Technology (Comment)

Announcing the Modesto Scripting Language Meetup

Announcing the Modesto Scripting Languages Meetup. Central Valley Pythonistas, Rubyists, PHPers, etc all welcome.

Posted January 25th, 2012 in Programming Python (Comment)

Calling all PyCon Rejects

I recently received a very polite email from the PyCon program chair telling me what I already knew: my talk proposal didn't get accepted. My talk was rejected.

Let me explain how I already knew, why being rejected is not a bad thing, and why I'm challenging you to put your rejection to good use both personally and for the Python community.

Posted December 23rd, 2011 in Programming Python (Comment)

What is "Un-Pythonic"?

Tonight's Baypiggies topic is going to be What is Pythonic - Marilyn Davis is doing the presentation. I had a few thoughts but they're all in the opposite direction. I don't feel authoritative enough to define Pythonicness but as an instructor I frequently get to see code written by students new to Python that is obviously un-pythonic, for lack of a better term.

Posted December 15th, 2011 in Programming Python (Comment)

AHAH with Django and jQuery

I was recently asked about using AJAX via JQuery with Django and mentioned that I frequently use html fragments and a decorator to add Ajax functionality to existing views. Let's see how that works. (more after the jump).

Posted August 22nd, 2011 in Django Programming Python (Comment)

PDB Howto

Cool! See Max's awesome video editing skills render my pdb howto relatively stumble free! If you're curious about how to use the built in Python debugger this brief video tutorial should get you going.

Posted August 11th, 2011 in Programming Python (Comment)

The best way to OR a list of Django ORM Q objects

A co-worker asked me today about the best way to OR together a list of Q objects in the Django ORM. Usually you have a specific number of conditions and you can use Q objects and the bitwise OR operator to logical OR the query conditions together. The Q object is necessary because multiple arguments or successive calls to .filter are ANDed. But what if you have an arbitrary number of Q conditions?

One suggestion is to use the undocumented .add method of the Q object in a loop to add multiple query conditions together. I thought this might be a good use case for reduce and the operator module:



# Normal Usage with the | operator
from django.db.models import Q
qs = MyModel.objects.filter(Q(cond1=1) | Q(cond2="Y"))

#but given a list of Q conditions
from operator import __or__ as OR
lst = [Q(...), Q(...), Q(...)]
qs = MyModel.objects.filter(reduce(OR, lst))

Is this the most Pythonic approach?

Posted June 14th, 2011 in Programming (Comment)

Teaching Retrospective

As you can probably figure out from the last post, I have a new gig.

Thanks to the good folks at marakana.com I recently taught a Python Fundamentals course in San Francisco.

This was my first time teaching for Marakana and I enjoyed the experience immensely - as did my students judging by their class reviews at the end! I had a blast and am looking forwards to more python classes, including an under-development Pro Django course. More details to come in this space - and thanks to Jas, Brenda, Mike, Chris, and Robert for being great first-time students. I hope you all go on to Pythonic success.

Posted June 14th, 2011 in Programming (Comment)

Python Fundamentals Resources

Deprecated: see the Python Fundamentals Page instead of this post

This will just be a grab bag of extra resources and notes for my students taking the Python Fundamentals Course at Marakana. Don't forget to grab the labs.

Additional Resources

Python in a Nutshell
Dive into Python Online Book - somewhat dated but still good.
The Official Python Tutorial
Code like a Pythonista: read this and your code will be pythonic.
Doug Hellman's Python Module of the Week - a great way to get to know Python's vast stdlib.

Important Basics You Should Know

Python builtin functions: see the http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html. Or


import __builtin__
dir(__builtin__)

Keywords: see the docs http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#keywords. Or


import keyword
print(keyword.kwlist)

Tools

IPython - a better python shell
Python Regex Testing Tool
virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper - tools for managing python environments. If you find yourself installing 3rd party python code you should be using these tools.
Stuck on windows? Use a replacement console

Additional Documentation Referred to in Class

Simple String Formatting
Built In Exception Types
Quick Doctest Overview - but I like to use
```
$ python -m doctest -v myfile.py
```
Don't forget the first dunderscore hack you'll need:
```
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
```
A great walkthrough of the stdlib logging module
str.format
JSON in stdlib
List of dunderscore methods

Don't forget the old labs - new labs and samples coming soon!

Posted May 30th, 2011 in Programming (Comment)

WSGI Mysteries

Recently I had a mysterious error cropping up on a Satchmo Store I set up for a client. Every so often I would have an HTTP 500 error with the error log indicating that a template could not be read because the specified charset wasn't available. I edited the Django template loader code to produce more information and only managed to push the exception down into the Python source code.


str = codecs.open(filepath, encoding="utf-8").read()
File "/opt/python2.6/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 865, in open
    file = __builtin__.open(filename, mode, buffering)
LookupError: unknown encoding: ANSI_X3.4-1968

The template that was being opened was valid UTF-8 and even stranger - as the same user and using the same virtualenv as the WSGI app I can open a file specifying an ANSI_X3.4-1968 encoding.

It occurred to me that it must be problem with the environment somehow so I spent some time reading the WSGI documentation. Eventually I changed one line in my wsgi config for the app and resolved my problem. The configuration:


    WSGIDaemonProcess sitename user=sitename threads=1 display-name=%{GROUP}
    WSGIProcessGroup sitename
    WSGIApplicationGroup sitename
    # Previous setting:
    # WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}

If I understand correctly all my wsgi applications configured using %{GLOBAL} were sharing the same interpreter. Somehow another process must be messing up the state of the interpreter somehow - using WSGIApplicationGroup with a value forces this application to run in its own sub-interpreter and this cleared up my problem. What I don't have is any insight into why my original error was occuring. Any thought?

Posted April 28th, 2011 in Programming (Comment)

Hidden Django QuerySet Features II

Recently while reading a co-workers code I discovered that Django's Queryset can be OR'ed together - but this may not always be a good idea. Django's ORM overloads the bitwise OR operator to express logical OR and the documentation demonstrates this with a Q object. Let's query the ORM to find recently active users - users who joined this year or who have logged in this year:


>>> from django.db.models import Q
>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> from datetime import date
>>> jan_1st = date(2011, 1, 1)
>>> recent = User.objects.filter(Q(last_login__gte=jan_1st) 
                             | Q(date_joined__gte=jan_1st))
>>> print(recent._as_sql())

('SELECT U0."id"
  FROM "auth_user" U0
  WHERE (U0."last_login" >= %s
          OR U0."date_joined" >= %s )',
 (u'2011-01-01 00:00:00', u'2011-01-01 00:00:00'))

The where clause in the generated SQL is exactly what we wanted. It turns out, however, that you can use the | operator on querysets directly to yield the same thing.


>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> from datetime import date
>>> jan_1st = date(2011, 1, 1)
>>> recent_login = User.objects.filter(last_login__gte=jan_1st)
>>> recent_join = User.objects.filter(date_joined__gte=jan_1st)
>>> recent = recent_login | recent_join
>>> print(recent._as_sql())
('SELECT U0."id"
  FROM "auth_user" U0
  WHERE (U0."last_login" >= %s
          OR U0."date_joined" >= %s )',
 (u'2011-01-01 00:00:00', u'2011-01-01 00:00:00'))

Sweet! It's always bothered me that chained calls were AND'ed together and there was apparently no way to do a simple OR without importing an additional class. However this feature has to be used with care - you are OR'ing entire queries instead of clauses so careless usage might lead to expensive queries. For instance imagine that we want to only look at certain automatically created recent users whose usernames start with "applicant". OR'ing entire querysets works. Sort of.



>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> from datetime import date
>>> jan_1st = date(2011, 1, 1)
>>> applicants = User.objects.filter(username__startswith="applicant")
>>> recent_login = applicants.filter(last_login__gte=jan_1st)
>>> recent_join = applicants.filter(date_joined__gte=jan_1st)
>>> recent = recent_login | recent_join
>>> print(recent._as_sql())
('SELECT U0."id"
  FROM "auth_user" U0
  WHERE
   ((U0."username"::text LIKE %s  AND U0."last_login" >= %s )
     OR
    (U0."username"::text LIKE %s  AND U0."date_joined" >= %s ))',
 (u'applicant%',
  u'2010-01-01 00:00:00',
  u'applicant%',
  u'2010-01-01 00:00:00'))

Note that this did exactly what we asked - OR'ed two querysets. This results in duplication in the where clause - we really only want to run the LIKE search on the username once and then filter the results by OR'ing the two date criterion. The results from the this query will be correct but the execution (depending on your DB backend) may be slower as the LIKE operator is run on the entire data set twice. In my case I noticed an excessively complicated query in the SQL results pane of my django-debug-toolbar. Due to directly OR'ing two complicated querysets four or five expensive operations were being duplicated on a table with a million records. Switching to a Q object produced a much shorter (and faster) query with the same results.

Posted February 20th, 2011 in Programming (Comment)

Hidden Django QuerySet Features I

I've been paying attention to the generated SQL the Django ORM provides lately. I've had to a bit of performance tuning on some apps I wrote so I started out with the django-debug-toolbar app which will show you all the queries run on a given page and their runtime. This is an indispensable tool in my daily toolkit but I wanted to play with creating queries in my console. How do I see the SQL that is generated?

Somewhere (probably just through introspection) I found the semi-private _as_sql() method.


>>> User.objects.filter(is_staff=True)._as_sql()
('SELECT U0."id" FROM "auth_user" U0 WHERE U0."is_staff" = %s ', (True,))

Notice that this doesn't return all the fields ("select id from..."). This method also won't work on value QuerySets and shouldn't be depended on as it is not a part of the public interface of the QuerySet class. It does helpfully returns a two part tuple of the query string with placeholders and a tuple containing the query parameters. This is useful if you want to tweak the parameters on the fly and paste them into a db console. A better method to get the sql actually being executed is to access the .query member of a QuerySet:


>>> users = User.objects.filter(is_staff=True)
>>> users.query
<django.db.models.sql.query.BaseQuery object at 0x9df63ac>
>>> str(users.query)
'SELECT "auth_user"."id", "auth_user"."username", "auth_user"."first_name", 
"auth_user"."last_name", "auth_user"."email", "auth_user"."password", "auth_user"."is_staff", 
"auth_user"."is_active", "auth_user"."is_superuser", "auth_user"."last_login", 
"auth_user"."date_joined" FROM "auth_user" WHERE "auth_user"."is_staff" = True '

Finally you can see all the queries that have run by looking at the connection object.


>>> from django.db import connection
>>> print connection.queries
[{'sql': 'SELECT ....',
  'time': '0.009'},]

I redacted the actual query but this returns rows of dicts with the sql that was run and how long it took to run.

Posted February 14th, 2011 in Programming (Comment)

Python Code Quality

(I'm presenting the Newbie Nugget tonight @ Baypiggies. My topic is Python Code Quality - read on for the scoop.)

Posted February 25th, 2010 in Programming Python (Comment)

Pydelatt

Part of what I do for my clients is manage their software/hardware infrastructure. Most of my clients are not large enough to have dedicated sys-admin staff so in addition to wearing the software developer hat I sometimes get to wear the sysadmin hat as well. This is not always a good thing and sometimes I end up writing software (what I like to do) to fix a sys-admin style problem (the stuff I don't like to deal with).

So recently a colocated box I manage for a real estate company started to run low on disk space. The main culprit was the the mailbox accounts - realtors frequently mail large documents (pictures, contracts, flyers, etc) and most of the mail accounts had a gig or two of mail. I decided to set a policy of deleting old attachments and looked for a tool to accomplish this task.

No luck - Dan Born's Delatt looked like it would do what I wanted but I couldn't actually get it to work. This was probably my fault but trying to figure out what wasn't working meant debugging Perl. Not my favorite language, and more to the point my Perl chops are about a decade rusty now. So I wrote a tool in python to do what I want. Pydelatt accepts a maildir filename and strips out any attachments whose mime type is not text/*.

All the usual caveats apply (use at your own risk, attachments are deleted irrecoverably and user error may cause your hair to burst into flame) but I'm using it as a policy tool (`find -mtime 120 -size +3M | xargs -ix pydelatt.py 'x'`) tool and I've successfully run it on a couple hundred gigs of email without incident for a month now...

Posted December 21st, 2009 in Programming (Comment)

Off to present at Baypiggies again

I'm off to present again. My topic is Fixing Django with 3rd party apps and it's some best practices advice plus dev oriented apps I think are useful. The slides are here in s5 format (hit the spacebar to advance).

Update: The presentation went well - a few additional notes. The slides don't show it but I live demoed Rob Hudson's django-debug-toolbar and the command-extension runserver_plus/werkzeug debugger. My slide on South is non-informative because I followed Glen Jarvis' presentation on South... I had fun and I'll post links to the videos when they get posted.

I had follow up questions afterwords about finding cool 3rd party apps - and was trying to remember the recent blog post I saw that had a nice list. For anybody still looking for that check out Kevin Fricovsky's post on the apps that power mingus.

Posted October 22nd, 2009 in Programming (Comment)

Jutda Helpdesk

Jutda helpdesk rocks!

Posted May 14th, 2009 in Django Recommends (Comment)

Sample fabfile

As a follow-up to the Virtualen/Pip/Fabric presentations post, here's a sample fabfile from a project I'm working on right now...

Posted May 2nd, 2009 in Programming (Comment)

Baypiggies Presentations

Last night I participated in the Baypiggies Tools Night - I ended up in charge of the evening and listened to interesting presentations by Sandrine Ribeaux on Pylint, JJ on ... well ... random stuff in the Unix way, Drew demonstrating a bunch of different tools (depgraph makes cool pics like this out of your code's dependency graph, kcachegrind makes cool pics of your profiling output).

When all that (plus the newbie nugget on Big-O notation and python container types) was over we were almost out of time. I had three presentations prepared: one on using virtualenv to isolate python environments, one on using pip (Ian Bicking's easy_install replacement), and a presentation on fabric (the pythonic remote deployment tool). Due to the time limitations I did an abbreviated run through the first two and spent most of my time on fabric. I think a video of the audio and slides will be up at some point - in the mean time you can see my slides on virtualenv here, the pip slides here, and the fabric slides here - hit the space bar once the slides load to move through them.

I also ended up talking afterward about how I prepared my slides: I used the rst2s5 tool that's included in docutils to turn my slide's rst source into the html slides I used in my presentation. Any modern browsers will show a nice click through slide show using Eric Meyer's S5 slide format...

Posted March 28th, 2009 in Programming (Comment)

Supervisord 3.0?

I'm starting to run into a problem with the excellent supervisord. I currently use it to keep my Django processes alive on my VPS and now that I have a couple dozen managed processes I'm realising the shortcomings in the design of supervisord.

Supervisord is basically a friendly init system written in python. Rather than have to write init scripts in shell I just edit my supervisord.conf files, run supervisord as root, and all my long running processes (mostly Django instances) are started and managed by supervisord. This works well until I need to an additional process; currently reloading the config file means restarting the supervisor daemon which means restarting all the processes it controls (and a time wait/heavy server load while they all start simultaneously.)

I'm aware that there are some patches (twiddler) to allow you to dynamically add tasks without editing the .conf file. What I really want, however, is to be able to reload the conf file and only affect tasks that aren't already running (so adding a new process to the config file and reloading would only affect the newly added task.) It makes me very happy to see some discussion of this on the supervisor mailing list (see here, for example) towards the end of 2008. Of course now I'm just waiting anxiously for a 3.0 release - and wondering if I should stop complaining that my free ice-cream isn't being delivered fast enough and pitch in and help instead...

Posted March 5th, 2009 in Recommends (Comment)

Django Tree Menu

I plan to regularly highlight Django apps I've found useful. I know there are some pluggable app review sites springing up - but I think it's one way of thanking authors in a small way for sharing their code with the Django Community.

With that in mind - I recently switched from my own menu app to Django TreeMenus - mostly because they have a nice admin (I have to check out how they implemented the ordering buttons in the admin; it's very nice!) I do wish they'd use the indispensable mptt to add the tree management features. It would be nice to have one really polished reusable hierarchical tree app, instead of many custom re-implementations, but this is a small nit to pick. This is definitely worth your while if you want your menus to be adminable... It's just a `pip install -E env -e svn+http://django-treemenus.googlecode.com/svn/trunk#egg=treemenus` away :)

Posted March 1st, 2009 in Django Recommends (Comment)

The business of software

Don't Sprint! It keeps you from blogging...

Posted August 28th, 2008 in Business (Comment)

Finally Blogging

I'm happy to be finally blogging at my new home. I've been considering what tone to take with the blog on my "professional" site and I'm going to try to limit it to stuff that relates to my business. Expect to see in this space announcements about software releases, sites going live, and reviews of software that I use in my business. If you're looking for programming commentary, Baypiggies reviews, and generally random ramblings about books, music, theology and whatever else pops into my head you might subscribe to my personal blog at metapundit.net.

Posted June 3rd, 2008 in (Comment)