As an open source “Plone guy”, I’m always prepared to defend and explain my choice to not use Plone for blogging. As an open source “Plone guy”, I’m always prepared to defend and explain my choice to not use Plone for blogging. A couple years ago, I started using WordPress in order to learn its […]
Virtualenv Quickstart Guide
I was searching for a nice virtualenv quickstart guide today, but couldn’t find one that I liked. Either they were outdated and still relied on easy_install, or they were too complicated. So here’s my own. Why use virtualenv? Virtualenv (http://www.virtualenv.org/) basically provides you with a full Python environment (and/or versions) inside a single folder. This […]
OAuth Needs To Die In A Fire
As a personal project I’ve recently been looking into creating a small Twitter client in Objective-C/Cocoa. This is largely because I quite like Objective-C as a language and haven’t had the chance to write anything significant in it, but also partly because Twitter have made the news recently with their API nuttiness and I wanted […]
About the Lack of Updates
If you look over my contributions to my own open source projects over the last six months you will have noticed that I became less active. Why is that? There is no big conspiracy ongoing and I also don’t plan on keeping it this way, but there are two reasons for this. The first one […]
Git Yer Hooks In
Git, like all good source control systems, allows you to customise the behaviour of the SCM when certain actions occur. For lots of people in lots of projects it’s not vital to use these hooks, but from time-to-time you find yourself repeating the same commands time-and-again. In these scenarios, it is worth looking into setting […]
A Whistlestop Tour of Python Requests
Return to our regularly scheduled technical blogging, I’m going to give a quick overview of one of the software libraries I know best: Kenneth Reitz’s Requests library for the Python programming language. Since I started making minor (and I mean really minor) contributions to the library, I’ve become increasingly familiar with its use and utility, […]
pythonpackages.com: pyformance 0.2
pythonpackages.com helps Python programmers package and release their software with just a few clicks. pyformance 0.2 pythonpackages.com recently processed it’s first official release via the new GitHub Service. As such, we are celebrating the release of pyformance 0.2! According to the author Omer Gertel: It’s a straight forward port of Coda Hale’s fantastic metrics package […]
Opalescent Olympics
Author’s Note: I’m taking a break from writing about tech to write about sports. Any readers who aren’t interested should wait until next week, when I sort-of-promise to write about the Python Requests library. Australian Opals enjoying their Bronze Medal victory. Image courtesy of London2012.com. The 2012 Summer Olympics are coming to a close. As […]
Codec Confusion in Python
Alright, I admit Alex Gaynor is a pretty clever guy but I was very close to strangling him today for this tweet: @alex_gaynor: WTF does str.encode or unicode.decode even do on Python2? And that’s because on the way to Python 3 these functions were removed because they cause confusion with people, but this broke a […]
Pythonpackages.com: New GitHub Service – Push to Release
pythonpackages.com helps Python programmers package and release their software with just a few clicks. PythonPackages GitHub Service There is a new GitHub Service available for pythonpackages.com that allows you to release Python packages from GitHub to the Python Package Index, simply by pushing a commit message that begins with “Release” e.g.: $ git commit -a -m […]
pythonpackages.com: Using PyPI’s OAuth1 support to register and upload packages
TL;DR PyPI has OAuth1 support; pythonpackages.com uses it to send your GitHub repos to PyPI. Thanks in very large part to Richard Jones, the Python Package Index now has support for registering and uploading packages via OAuth1. And using his sample code I was able to take advantage of it on pythonpackages.com. The result is […]
Let’s Build A Fileserver!
Those of you who know me will be familiar with the fact that I am what could be called a ‘digital packrat’. After a few years of university my DVD/Blu-Ray collection has expanded to the point that it fills multiple shelves, and I have digitised the whole thing. This has turned into a more than […]
Building Windows Installers in the Cloud
With pythonpackages.com I want to solve real problems for people today. So here’s a proof of concept for building Windows installers quickly and easily “in the cloud” (i.e. without a Windows machine local). This article is mostly about the back end, as the front end is already documented. TL;DR: We’re moving from proof-of-concept phase to […]
Mail Loop From Hell
Found in #django on freenode, Jul 12, 2012. All names are edited. 11:16 < abrt> since it’s quiet in here I’ll tell you a story. 11:16 < abrt> back in 1992, I had just graduated university and was interning at a government facility in newport news 11:16 < abrt> along with some friends from college. […]
Pillow Moved to python-imaging Organization
On 7/30/2010 Pillow, the friendly PIL fork, was released. Since then, there have been a number of releases: $ vanity Pillow Pillow-1.0.tar.gz 2010-07-31 800 Pillow-1.1.tar.gz 2010-08-01 652 Pillow-1.2.tar.gz 2010-08-02 1,987 Pillow-1.3.zip 2010-11-28 589 Pillow-1.4.zip 2010-11-28 587 Pillow-1.5.zip 2010-11-28 876 Pillow-1.6.zip 2010-12-01 6,706 Pillow-1.7.0.zip 2011-05-28 678 Pillow-1.7.1.zip […]