Lateral Opinion

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Watch TV anywhere (in your home, at least) ...

A tool to integrate qmail-smtpd with clamav and spamassassin. ...

Learn how to use RBL effectively with qmail and qmail-spp. ...

Description and tips on how to boot using runit ...

Creating data aware widgets in PyQt ...

Why your program is a frog. But not a real frog, a Lamarckian one. ...

You know, some things are usable. Some things aren't. Read on, to see one that isn't and one that (I think) is. A semi-tongue-in-cheek usability article. ...

A new (the second) realtime tutorial. ...

A short tutorial explaining how to make easy-to-reuse widgets using PyQt ...

Opening and saving files is not as easy as it seems for a GUI app. You have to check permissions, give meaningful error messages. And with very little effort, you can make it do a few nice tricks :-) ...

How can the world of UI and HCI designers interface with the world of free software coders? A realistic proposal. ...

Short tutorial explaining how to write a cooperative-multithreaded app using the GNU pth library. Old stuff, written in march of 2000! ...

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A non-educational tutorial showing rapid application development with Qt+PyQt+Eric3+Python ...

Why integration matters for development ...

I am a big fan of GoodReads a social network for people who read books. ...

Because it worked once, let's do it again. I have just set a completely arbitrary, and probably too early date for the release of the first english Issue of " PET: Python Entre Todos " magazine. ...

Today at 00:00:00 GMT-3 PET: Python entre todos was indeed launched, in time (arbitrary but forced) and in budget ($0). ...

I will be speaking at the Jornadas del Sur in Bahía Blanca this weekend (August 14/15 and 16). ...

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I do almost all my business writing (and my book ) using restructured text. And when I want to produce print-quality output, I tend to use my own tool, rst2pdf . ...

Alejandro Dolina once wrote (and this is from memory that's probably 25 years old) of a round table discussing " What's Tango? " , and how after two hours of discussing the nature, characteristics and history of tango, one of the members of the panel picked up a bandoneón, played " El apache argentino " stood up and left without saying a word. ...

I enjoy creating desktop applications. That means I may be a member of a dying breed, since web apps are going to make us all obsolete next week, but I do enjoy doing it. ...

My previous post explained how to cache whole web pages as images. Now see it in action. This is a lightweight RSS reader, optimized for comic books (but it works for any feed) and for offline use (but it works online too, of course). ...

For a small project I am doing I wanted the capability to see web pages offline. So, I started thinking of a way to do that, and all solutions were annoying or impractical. ...

I'm one of the speakers for the free python courses in FM La Tribu, in Buenos Aires. ...

The kind fellows at Packt Publishing have sent me a copy of this book to review, and I have been slow with it (flu doesn't help). In any case, while I finally start reading it, here's the usual free sample chapter ...

I make a living working with free software (BTW, if you need sysadmins that know what they do, contact us: http://www.netmanagers.com.ar ) ...

A few days ago I finally got my 89 cents bluetooth dongle (now $1.85, but still with free shipping from china!) and got a bunch of pictures I had in my phone. ...

I am writing a book. And I am writing a chapter about UI design. And why not use the Internet? ...

I am just not writing here. I am writing a book instead. ...

Today, March 24th is Ada Lovelace day, a day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. . I am taking the liberty to tag this as python so it appears in the right planets, but that's just to promote Ada Lovelace day. Sorry 'bout that. ...

The people at Packt Publishing has been kind enough to send me a copy of Grok 1.0 Web Development by Carlos de la Guardia. ...

It's my pleasure to announce that I just uploaded rst2pdf 0.14 to the site at http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com . ...

Yesterday in the PyAr mailing list a " silly " subject appeared: how would you translate spanish to rosarino? ...

I've just uploaded the 0.13 version of rst2pdf, a tool to convert reStructured text to PDF using Reportlab to http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com ...

If you haven't read Jeff Atwood's Why Can't Programmers.. Program? go ahead, then come back. ...

As mentioned previously, I am hacking a bit on a proof-of-concept word processor. Right now, it's hosted on googlecode and called kuatia . ...

I just uploaded version 0.7 of Marave, my fullscreen text editor to http://marave.googlecode.com ...

I have been thinking on what I really really want in a word processor. And then what would it take to create such a thing. ...

Writing an editor is reinventing the wheel. I know that. I tell myself Marave is a fine wheel, with distinct features, and I think that is true, but, if you are reinventing the wheel, there's no need to reinvent the axle and the spoke, too. ...

The nice fellows at Packt Publishing have sent me a copy of Grok 1.0 Web Development by Carlos de la Guardia to review. ...

Here's what Ohloh has to say about the cost of developing Marave ...

Version 0.6 of Marave, my peaceful, fullscreen text editor is now available at the usual place: http://marave.googlecode.com ...

I had a small task today in Marave . The goal was: ...

Marave is a text editor. If there's one thing that's true of most text editors, it's this: they lack the exact features you need. ...

yak shaving ...

This is not interesting for almost noone, but since my google-fu didn't let me find it and it was a bit of a pain to do: ...

Just uploaded Marave 0.5 to the usual place . Marave is a relaxed, fullscreen text editor that tries not to distract you. ...

I have worked really hard on Marave , a full screen editor in the style of ommwriter, DarkRoom, WriteRoom, pyRoom, etc. I have worked very hard and I want users to use it. ...

Version 0.4 of Marave, a distraction-free fullscreen editor is out at http://marave.googlecode.com ...

Version 0.3 of Marave, a distraction-free fullscreen editor is out at http://marave.googlecode.com ...

Version 0.2 of Marave, a distraction-free fullscreen editor is out at http://marave.googlecode.com ...

The first " good " version of Marave my relaxing text editor is out! ...

Everything I will say here was probably better said by Mark Pilgrim but what the heck, let's give it a shot. ...

Announcement: ...

Since yesterday this blog is ten years old so, time for some history. ...

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years: programming shell scripts suck. They are ugly and error prone. The only reason why we still do it? There is no real replacement. ...

So, what do you do for a living? ...

Many programs require passwords from the user. ...

When I was migrating the comments I noticed a page looked wrong in the site, and started fixing it. ...

Introduction ...

First a short explanation: ...

No, not unique in the sense " oh, this app is a special snowflake " , but unique in the sense " you can only run one copy of this application " . ...

How to write a tiny python app (less than 50 lines) that reacts to events on the DBUS buses. For example, displaying a notification when you press one of your keyboards' special keys. ...

I wrote a while ago a RSS program called uRSSus . I expect I am the only user of it because it has some problems (all of them my fault ;-) but I really like it. ...

This is not really part of my PyQt by Example series but since it's a totally unrelated topic that would be impossible to connect to it, but is still a PyQt tutorial and shares the concept so, here it is. ...

No, this is not a post announcing I just wrote my first public python code. This is a post about my first public python code... from 1996! ...

I will be doing a brand-new never seen introduction to PyQt programming at the " Jornadas de Software Libre y Open Source " in Mar del Plata tomorrow or the next day. ...

I have long known that application development is an arduous process. I have also long suspected one of the reasons it's arduous is the developer. I should be more specific, I am one of the reasons. ...

I just uploaded rst2pdf 0.12.2 to http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com Rst2pdf is a tool to generate PDF files directly from restructured text sources via reportlab. ...

I just uploaded rst2pdf 0.12.1 to http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com ...

It's my pleasure to announce the release of rst2pdf version 0.12, available at http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/downloads/list ...

As usual, a video showing it: ...

Thanks to Nicolás Pace, I got a video of the Pycon Argentina 2009 lightning talks. ...

Here's what fc-match does: ...

In my original post about it I was referring to Bookrest as a stylesheet editor for rst2pdf , because that's what I wanted, a way to test style changes and see what they did. ...

Yes, the program known so far as " my rst2pdf editor/previewer application " is now called Bookrest. ...

I am in the middle of that honeymoon you get starting a new app. Every new feature seems tobe just 50 lines of code away, there is no legacy code (in fact, you are creating that legacy code), and you learn new tricks all the time. ...

First: I really, really need a name for this thing. I am tired of saying " my rst2pdf previewer/editor app " . ...

yak shaving ...

yak shaving ...

Inspired by a post by André Roberge I wanted to see if rst2pdf was too slow to be used for real-time previews in a restructured text editor. ...

There is a very funny thread currently in the PyAr (Python Argentina) mailing list. ...

Since this is the first post that appears in Planet Python, a small intro is in order. ...

The guy at Mission: Cognition actually released his spreadsheet! ...

Ok, it kinda works a little . ...

Some guys at PyAr are translating the python tutorial to spanish. ...

As of today, rst2pdf supports Chris Liechti's awesome aafigure . ...

It's my pleasure to announce the release of rst2pdf version 0.11, available at http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/downloads/list ...

Since the last release, there have been many changes, improvements and fixes in rst2pdf . ...

So, rst2pdf 0.10 was not ok. The setup.py that worked on 0.9 simply didn't work for the new version. ...

After 8 months (!) it's finally out: rst2pdf 0.10 ready for downloading from its homepage . ...

A bit of time today, too: ...

Looks like someone is finally working on getting sphinx to generate PDFs using rst2pdf ...

After an awfully long time, I set aside one hour for coding, and spent it on bugfixing for rst2pdf . ...

Thanks to Leonardo De Luca, session 4 is now available in spanish ...

Thanks to Nicolás Miyasato, session 3 is now available in spanish . ...

Thanks to Nicolás Pace, session 2 is now available in spanish . ...

This is how you add basic authentication to your Juno app: ...

I am currently in dire need of creating a nice admin page for a LDAP addressbook, which should do some slightly unusual things with the data (like manipulating Postfix's virtual table). ...

The spanish translations of most sessions of " PyQt by Example " are almost done, thanks to several volunteers. ...

I am finally publishing my LatinoWare 2008 tutorial, in revised and expanded form. It will probably be a 10-part series, and here is session 5 . ...

Anyone actually buying Tree ? ...

I planned to have it ready for today, but my current consulting job (migrating a firm from Exchange to FLOSS) is getting a bit gnarly (mostly because of Outlook 2000) (Yes, I know). ...

Thanks to Sebastián Bassi, there is now a spanish translation of the first part of the series. You can read it here . ...

I am finally publishing my LatinoWare 2008 tutorial, in revised and expanded form. It will probably be a 10-part series, and here is session 4 . ...

I am finally publishing my LatinoWare 2008 tutorial, in revised and expanded form. It will probably be a 10-part series, and here is session 3 . ...

I am finally publishing my LatinoWare 2008 tutorial, in revised and expanded form. It will probably be a 10-part series, and here is session 2 . ...

I am finally publishing my LatinoWare 2008 tutorial, in revised and expanded form. It will probably be a 10-part series, and here is session 1 ...

I am using rawdog for Planeta PyAr and I am very happy with it. One thing I really didn't like was the templating. ...

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I just finished implementing my first public planet, Planeta PyAr using rawdog . It contains the blogs of members of Python Argentina ...

So all the latest releases of uRSSus have a horrible bug: if you had never used it, it would not work at all. ...

Yay! ...

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Since I did some neat coding on it yesterday and today, I decided it was a good moment to release uRSSus 0.2.11 into the wild. ...

Yes, after months of doing nothing, I hve made some changes in uRSSus , my RSS aggregator. ...

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Yes, again, two months passed and nothing on the blog. What can I say, my life takes a lot of my time. ...

Last night while eating one of the Python Brazil guys told me about the Lightning Talks session taking place today. ...

Just finished speaking about PyQt programming in LatinoWare. ...

I have been thinking about using rst2pdf to create presentations. I finished exposing PDF transitions today, and that part works nicely. ...

First a huge announcement: I will not release anything tomorrow. For the first time in 6 weeks, no friday release from me! ...

I spent a few hours today round Code Golf and here's a neat thing I did.I think this is python's shortest possible factorial: ...

Well, what the title says. Get it at the usual places . No, it doesn't require actual LaTeX. Just Matplotlib. ...

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I announced it on all other places except here: rst2pdf 0.8.1 is out. What's new? ...

Of course I could be misunderstanding this, but it seems they included uRSSus 0.2.10 in a DVD for some reason :-) ...

So, I failed to release uqbar this week. However, I am releasing rst2pdf 0.8, with SVG support! Get its vectorial goodness from http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com ...

I just committed into trunk of rst2pdf a nicely working SVGImage flowable for reportlabs. ...

One of the big limitations of reportlab is that it has no support for vector-based images. You can't insert SVG, EPS or any other vector-based format in your documents. ...

On my ongoing something-released-every-friday rampage, this friday I will release a working version of Uqbar, a Gutenberg project e-texts interface. ...

Right on schedule, everything I promised, plus much simpler/smarter font embedding, and maybe a bag of chips. More at http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com . ...

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Many new features. Custom page layouts! Multiple frames per page! Multiple layouts per document! Cascading stylesheets! Not very buggy! Get it at http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com or via PyPI. ...

How good? Let me tell you... ...

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I did a release yesterday, and another today of my rst-to-pdf-without-latex tool. What's new? Here's an incomplete list: ...

This mini-sprint is doing wonders for rst2pdf. Now on SVN: pygments-based syntax highlighting. Example here : rst2pdf's code, in a PDF by rst2pdf. ...

Following my new policy of one release every friday, in 6 days you will see a rst2pdf release. But not any release: a great release. ...

Since revision #17_ you can display Page numbers in headers and footers (only!) by using this syntax: ...

This article is inspired by a thread in the PyAr mailing list. Here´s the original question (translated): ...

Because of a thread in the PyAr list about generating reports from Python, I suggested using ReST and my rst2pdf script. ...

A little over a month ago, on July 15th, I opened a Google Code project called uRSSus. Here's the commit . My goal was to try building a desktop application like if I were building a web application, using a ORM, templating, generic views, and other things. ...

Just sent it to Python Argentina: ...

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After 27 days of development, uRSSus is finally a really usable app. I miss nothing from Akregator, although there are a few unimplemented things. It was broken the alst couple of days, because I was rewriting large chunks of its guts, but the new guts work much better ;-) ...

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When trying to serialize python data, often the first thing we look at is pickle. Well, sometimes pickle can be very expensive! ...

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Yes friends, my desktop feed agregator uRSSus has a brand new release. ...

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Truly a paperbag release. But there's still hope! ...

Version 0.2.9 of uRSSus , my news agregator is out. Many new features including: ...

It was rather easy because I didn't do the hard part (thanks authors of pyrfeed!)and now uRSSus has a simple " import my subscriptions from Google Reader " action. ...

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I had planned to release a new version today, but there are too many untested features. A list: ...

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At least three people have tried urssus (including me ;-) and over 80 have downloaded it. The two that told me anything say it's a nice app. ...

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So, I needed a python script to create tinyurls. Google gets me here where credit is given to this guy . Of course that guy 's solution is a bit broken, check the comments ;-) ...

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I did a fair amount of work in urssus today. The highlight? database schema migration. ...

I spent the day bugfixing. Then, when I realized I was fixing stull like " when you delete a feed, the unread count in the parent feed is not updated correctly " and " if you go to Next Unread article and there are none, make the search wrap " I decided this thing must really be working right, since both things failed me in at least one similar program that claims to be production-ready (not akregator! ;-) So I am releasing it as 0.1.0 ...

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When I started this project I wrote: ...

So I did work on it a little last night: ...

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Yes, I am now using uRSSus instead of Akregator. ...

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Today's 2 hours: ...

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I decided I needed an automatic report of some things on my email every day, and I wanted it to look nice both in plain text and HTML. Here's what I came up with. ...

I am a user of Argus as a monitoring software. Since it's very flexible and easy to extend, I wanted to add MSN alerts, the same way I had added SMS alerts a while ago. It was easier than I thought! ...

Reading a post on planetkde, I saw an apparently out-of-nowhere reference to blackboxqt... ...

Since I got my invitation and am tired of Haloscan not being reachable from home (not their fault, probably), I decided that my first project would be a comment hosting app. ...

I will probably write a comments app to replace my usage of haloscan. ...

Suppose you want to send SMS messages from windows through a bluetooth connection to a phone. ...

Just a snippet of code because every once in a while I need something like the classic memoize decorator but am working on a CentOS 4 bix (with python 2.3!) ...

The guys at http://github.com have been nice enough to add me to their beta program, so I am doing a little project there, to figure out if I like git or not. ...

It should not happen but it does: Your qmail server is overloaded. Maybe you are under a DOS attack, or there is a reason why you are getting 10x your usual amount of mail. ...

I am finishing my first large-ish Django app from scratch [1]. ...

There have been a few posts on planet KDE about text-based presentation tools ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) and while their solutions are all probably better than mine, I have to say I did something in the area about a year ago. ...

The eee is small. It has very little storage. So, why should I use dozens of MB on a word processor? Because I get word documents in the mail every once in a while. ...

My rst2pdf script has had several things happen to it. ...

UPDATE: you can get this program now at google code ...

I am still anxiously waiting for my Asus eee (still a week to go or so), and I was thinking about web browsing in the 7 " , 800x480 screen. ...

According to Slashdot , at least. ...

- If you don't know what qmail-spp is, please check it out. It makes qmail much much better. ...

I have said Linux sucks. Here's my new project: Make it suck less, one bit at a time. ...

The KDE project is relicensing some code. There is a tool to verify if any SVN account holder is blocking the relicensing of some file. ...

Checking on my semi-dead projects, I found that one was almost finished but I had forgotten about it: rater ...

Try this and be amazed: ...

Can you be a computer consultant and generally a computer guy without ever installing windows? ...

I have managed to create the most bizarre way to write a spreadsheet engine in Python. ...

No, do not use the alternatives. Use the Yahoo User Interface Rich Text Editor . ...

Because it's probably never going to work, but if it does, I can point out how ugly it was at first ;-) ...

Yup. Figured out column/cell spans in reportlab, found old rst2rst code that regularizes the table row/columns to be all the same number of elements, and voilá, tables work, including examples like this: ...

Really. I already have a functioning slideshow program , a spreadsheet and I could write a word processor in a week (for some values of " word " , " processor " , " write " , " week " and " a " .) ...

I did a little (very little) more work on rst2pdf [1] ...

It works much better than it did last night. ...

This has always been possible, going via LaTeX. ...

For a project I am doing for one of my customers, I needed a mailing list archive. I looked, and it seems the nicer one is Lurker . ...

This is the real outcome of my PyWeek failure: a neat library. ...

1 - I don't have the time for this kind of deadlines anymore. Not even one all-nighter? I did nothing on Saturday except real work and family reunion? ...

A bit of progress, although not much time to work on it anymore so I will probably not make it. ...

Not a game yet, but the engine is starting to look good. ...

Suddenly I was having a calm day at work, and Rosario is taking care of the baby, so I spent a few hours on the PyWeek project. ...

Well, it seems I am in trouble for PyWeek. ...

In the last few days I have been learning Django in perhaps the hardest way possible: by being hired to work on a site someone else wrote. ...

Allow me to enter trash-talking mode... ...

I have no idea how, but I ran into this in Linuxtoday : KDE Programming Tutorial 0.2 (Dec 22nd 1998, 00:09:36 ) Roberto Alsina announced that he uploaded to ftp.kde.org the version 0.2 of his excellent programming tutorial. It is also available here . Hopefully, this must-have material will be soon included in the kdesdk package and in CVS. ...

I got a mail from a reader telling me that he couldn't download the sources for Notty, the toy app I developed in my Rapid Application development using PyQt and Eric3 ... in realtime! tutorial. ...

Always remember to do this: ...

It seems that during the big SVN conversion some data were lost in commits. ...

Nowadays, the very little time I have for personal projects is spent doing things like fixing little things and adding little features to BartleBlog [1] and thinking how I could use GLE and mako templates to create a cool nerdy tool to create charts. ...

I am hacking a bit on rater my daemon/client to see if things are happening more often than they should (in other words, generic rate limiting). ...

Monday was a very special day: ...

Said Giles Bowkett The Perl community's starting to look more and more like the Lisp community every day. The combination of incredible power, reclusive wizards, and antisocial Slashdotters gives it the vibe of a lava-filled wasteland dotted with towers where strange men with white beards obsess over unspeakable knowledge. I spoke to someone once who compared programming in Lisp to studying Kabbalah, in that it does strange things to your head. Parts of Perl are like that. Still, source filtering's kind of cool. Unnecessary, but cool. ...

Quick, answer this: ...

I have been exploring embeddable languages for the last month or so. I have learned forth and some of its many many many variants [1] and while exploring one of the most obscure ones called Atlast [2] , I found a very interesting README which I will quote liberally in this post. Virtually every industry analyst agrees that open architecture is essential to the success of applications. And yet, even today, we write program after program that is closed--that its users cannot program--that admits of no extensions without our adding to its source code. If we believe intellectually, from a sound understanding of the economic incentives in the marketplace, that open systems are better, and have seen this belief confirmed repeatedly in the marketplace, then the only question that remains is why? Why not make every program an open program? ...

You may have noticed no posts about StupidSheet for about a week. ...

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For my spreadsheet project, I had to redo something I had forgotten about: cell displacement. I did that once when the formula language was python. ...

It promises: ...

After hacking for about two hours the cell dependencies yesterday using dicts, I found myself saying " how can I check if the dependency graph is cyclical? " ...

Adding something else to my plate is probably not a very good idea, but what the heck, I can make it sleep another three years if I lose interest. ...

I apologize in advance for any ugly amateurism in this post. It's my first attempt at a domain specific language :-) ...

In 2004 I saw a recipe about how to make a " spreadsheet " in python in 10 lines of code: ...

On 2004 I wrote a spreadsheet in python, which was about a 25KB download (compressed). It was pretty functional !. ...

I have been an Arch Linux for a while now, and I am still liking it. ...

I just released a wee piece of software, called RA-WebPass which is simply a webpage that you can use to change linux system passwords. ...

Since the very beginning, BartleBlog has been using CherryTemplate for its output formatting needs. I like it, because it's very simple. ...

Took a while to implement, but BartleBlog finally got a functional menu editor: ...

The Python config objects are convenient and simple, but they have a problem: you can only save strings. That means you need to store numbers as strings and remember to use the getint()/getfloat() methods (or coerce by hand!), which is error prone and anti-pythonic. Storing a list is even uglier. ...

... has been all about UI. ...

- Done with the main blog config dialog. ...

It's remarkably easy to turn your QTextBrowser into a limited web browser, at least good enough to show images from the web. ...

I probably should have charged more. ...

I found a couple of hours to hack, and decided to spend them on BartleBlog. ...

Got comissioned a small job for a customer: ...

...nothing. ...

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... bueno, el gurú dice muchas cosas, pero en particular, César Ballardini acaba de inaugurar su propio blog, http://katra.blogsavy.com/ ...

As a result of my playing with mootools and creating powerpoint-style slideshows on webpages from restructured text, I am pretty much decided about turning this into a standalone, real application. ...

Now, I don't know if this is useful, but I do think it's way neat. Inspired by S5_, rst2s5_, and mootools_ I took an hour (or two) and hacked this neat little slide tool. The goals differ from S5 in that I intend to write a frontend, so that you have a sort of very-poor-man's powerpoint, but also in that the output should be simple to embed in other pages so that I can eventually make this a part of bartleblog. Check it out (click to go to next slide, move mouse to the top of the slideshow for controls): .. raw:: html <div class="sl_presentation"> <script type="text/javascript"> new Asset.css('http://lateral.blogsite.org/static/css/slides.css'); slides=[ 'slide0', 'it-s-nerd-oriented', 'it-does-things-simply', 'it-s-very-easy-to-extend', 'and-it-has-kickass-features' ]; var current=-1; var numPages=5; var topMargin=25; var delay=1500; function slide_out() { if ( current > -1 && current < numPages ) { var eff1=$(slides[current]).effects({ duration: delay, transition: Fx.Transitions.cubicOut }); eff1.start({'top': [500]/*, 'height': [0]*/ } ); } } function slide_in() { if ( current > -1 && current < numPages ) { var eff1=$(slides[current]).effects({ duration: delay, transition: Fx.Transitions.cubicOut }); eff1.start({'top': [topMargin]/*, 'height': [450] */} ); } } function next() { slide_out(); current=current+1; slide_in(); }; function prev() { slide_out(); current=current-1; slide_in(); } function controls_in() { var eff=$('controlBox').effect('top',{ duration: 100 }); eff.start(0); } function controls_out() { var eff=$('controlBox').effect('top',{ duration: 100 }); eff.start(-100); } </script> <div id="controlBox" class="sl_control" onMouseOver="controls_in(); " > <span id="prev" onClick="if (current > 0 ) {prev();}">&lt;&lt;&nbsp;</span> <span id="next" onClick="if (current <numPages-1) { next();}">&nbsp;&gt;&gt;</span> </div> <div class="sl_cover" onMouseOver="controls_out();" onClick="if (current <numPages-1) { next();}"></div> <div id="header" class="sl_header"> </div> <div id="footer" class="sl_footer"> Why use BartleBlog </div> <div class="sl_slide" id="slide0"> <h1>Why use BartleBlog</h1> <h2 id="if-you-are-a-nerd">(If you are a nerd)</h2> <table class="docinfo" frame="void" rules="none"> <col class="docinfo-name" /> <col class="docinfo-content" /> <tbody valign="top"> <tr><th class="docinfo-name">Author:</th> <td>Roberto Alsina &lt;<a class="reference" href="mailto:ralsina&#64;kde.org">ralsina&#64;kde.org</a>&gt;</td></tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <div class="sl_slide" id="it-s-nerd-oriented"> <h1><a id="it-s-nerd-oriented" name="it-s-nerd-oriented">It's nerd-oriented</a></h1> <p>It's trivial to display source code, with proper syntax highlighting.</p> <div class="code-block"><pre><span class="k">from</span> <span class="nn">base64</span> <span class="k">import</span> <span class="o">*</span> <span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">myFirstFunction</span><span class="p">():</span> <span class="k">print</span> <span class="n">b64decode</span> <span class="p">(</span><span class="s">&#39;YnllIHdvcmxkIQ==&#39;</span><span class="p">)</span> </pre></div> <p>Even for things like shell sessions. Dammit, I am a nerd, I will try to add every nerd feature I deem cool.</p> </div> <div class="sl_slide" id="it-does-things-simply"> <h1><a id="it-does-things-simply" name="it-does-things-simply">It does things simply</a></h1> <p>Wanna show a flickr photo?</p> <div class="code-block"><pre><span class="p">..</span> <span class="nt">flickr:</span>: myPhotoTitle </pre></div> <p>How about using openomy.com to share your files? And whatever else you can think of, it probably <strong>can</strong> be done.</p> </div> <div class="sl_slide" id="it-s-very-easy-to-extend"> <h1><a id="it-s-very-easy-to-extend" name="it-s-very-easy-to-extend">It's very easy to extend</a></h1> <p>Really. It's simple python code.</p> <ul class="simple"> <li>The module to do syntax highlighting has 41 lines.</li> <li>The module to do dynamic animated menus has 103.</li> <li>The module to do calendars has 72.</li> </ul> <p>If there is a python module or web service to do what you want, hooking it into BartleBlog is simple.</p> </div> <div class="sl_slide" id="and-it-has-kickass-features"> <h1><a id="and-it-has-kickass-features" name="and-it-has-kickass-features">And it has kickass features</a></h1> <p>Like online, embedded, animated slideshows! Like this one! Done with 65 lines of simple almost-plain-text markup! Ok, it's not fully implemented yet, because it needs some manual code, but the hard part is done!</p> <p>Or automatic SVN changelog display ( I admit that's <em>somewhat niche</em> ;-))</p> <p>Now, who else has that kind of thing?</p> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> next(); </script></div> There may be an artifact when you slide out the syntax-highlighted boxes, but I have no idea how to fix it. Also, I have not tested it at all in IE, so if it fails there, don't worry, that's to be expected! Next time I speak in public, I may use this :-) And, as a teaser... this is the source for the presentation you just saw: .. code-block:: rst Why use BartleBlog ================== (If you are a nerd) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ :author: Roberto Alsina <ralsina@kde.org> It's nerd-oriented ------------------ It's trivial to display source code, with proper syntax highlighting. .. code-block:: python from base64 import * def myFirstFunction(): print b64decode ('YnllIHdvcmxkIQ==') Even for things like shell sessions. Dammit, I am a nerd, I will try to add every nerd feature I deem cool. It does things simply --------------------- Wanna show a flickr photo? .. code-block:: rst .. flickr:: myPhotoTitle How about using openomy.com to share your files? And whatever else you can think of, it probably **can** be done. It's very easy to extend ------------------------ Really. It's simple python code. * The module to do syntax highlighting has 41 lines. * The module to do dynamic animated menus has 103. * The module to do calendars has 72. If there is a python module or web service to do what you want, hooking it into BartleBlog is simple. And it has kickass features --------------------------- Like online, embedded, animated slideshows! Like this one! Done with 65 lines of simple almost-plain-text markup! Ok, it's not fully implemented yet, because it needs some manual code, but the hard part is done! Or automatic SVN changelog display ( I admit that's *somewhat niche* ;-)) Now, who else has that kind of thing? .. _mootools: http://www.mootools.net .. _s5: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ .. _rst2s5: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/slide-shows.html ...

A new gadget: Mootools based menus. ...

Isn't this neat? ...

I had a few minutes waiting for yum to do its thing and added a couple of easy features: ...

A lot of new features going on, like openomy based file uploading and links that work like simple rst directives: ...

I added a Restructured Text directive that takes as argument the title of one of your (my) flickr pictures, like this: ...

Added a Yahoo! Ui menubar generator. It turns this: ...

Another morning, another feature: archive ...

A couple more hours of hacking, and the templates are all new, and more functional then ever. ...

After a few more hours hacking, it's got the following working: ...

I have been posting this blog using PyDS for over 4 years now. Sadly, the PyDS author seems to have abandoned it. Which is sad, because it's nifty software. ...

I have been able to work some more on RaSPF and the results are encouraging. ...

RaSPF , my C port of PySPF , is pretty much functional right now. ...

In my previous post, I mentioned how PySPF does something using a regular expression which I couldn't easily reproduce in C. ...

Working on my SPF library, I ran into a problem. I needed to validate a specific element, and the python code is a little hairy (it splits based on a large regexp, and it's tricky to convert to C). ...

RaSPF , my attempted port of PySPF to C is now at a very special point in its life: ...

I am porting pyspf to C (long story, and I am stupid for trying). But of course, C is not python. ...

If so, what is the C POSIX regex (you know regcomp & friends) equivalent of this python regular expresion: ...

I am using ra-plugins as a toy to do things I never bothered in other projects. ...

Ok, the SPF implementation situation is kinda pathetic. ...

... who own a HP Jornada 720 and are using Opie on it and they have the spanish/latin-american keyboard... here is your keymap . ...

My Restructured Text to Restructured Text converter can now handle tables! ...

What is it? A program that takes a docutils document tree ( parsed from a RST document or programatically generated) then dumps as close as I can guess to reasonable RST back. ...

For a few months I have been using an unmanaged virtual private server from Tektonic , and I love it. ...

One of the things people study when they " learn unix " is shell scripting and usage. Because every system has a shell, and if you learn to use it interactively, you are half way there to automating system tasks! ...

I am now almost recovered from the trip to Santa Fe for the Jornada Python and I have reached a few conclussions. ...

Today's entry has no pieces of neat python code, no questions, no critic of anything, no interesting link, no hint of anything I wrote/(would/will)write, no funny piece, no unfunny piece, no nothing. ...

Thinking about CherryTV and ways to turn it into a real application, I thought the worse piece of it was the reliance on v4lctl, and how really you just don't know if it works or not, and how you can't finetune, and whatever, and run into Python-v4l . ...

If you are one of the three persons who actually see this blog on its site instead of reading it through some sort of aggregator, you may have noticed I have a banner. ...

I have posted in the past about runit . ...

In this russian site, you can see how they got my post about the Santa Fe python event. And apparently what impressed them is the thing about the fish and the beer. . ! ...

Bilingual entry here: ...

FaxWeb, a web frontend for mgetty+sendfax is finished. It works. It's probably close to bugfree ;-) ...

I have refactored IUP/Qt into a lovely object hierarchy. And I now remember why I dislike C++. ...

In the last month or two I have been writing a fair bit of C code. ...

In January, I suggested it would be trivial to write a preprocessor that would accept a version of python which delimited blocks with braces instead of indentation. ...

I have an idea that can kill the most frequent complain about python. ...

In the previous article, someone suggested cheating on exams as an interesting application of telepathy. ...

I just found here the announcement of the first free software I published (at least, that I recall), from may 13, 1996. So, It's going to be 10 years in 5 months! ...

About http://www.pycontest.net ... here's how it's done. ...

There is a python contest at http://www.pycontest.net/ ...

A long time ago, there was no Internet. ...

This is what I understood of Smoke so far. I may be way off, since it is C++ sorcery of a higher level than I'm used to, but I really think I am getting the hang of it (and a bunch of thanks to Richard Dale and Ashley Winters who are the ones that made me understand so far. Any mistakes a re my fault, any good thing is theirs ;-). ...

I just realized I have not learned a whole new real language in almost 5 years. ...

I was trying to do something weird: take one of my PyQt proggies, and compile it into a standalone binary using Jython, koala/qtjava and gjc. ...

A long time ago, I wrote a piece about how I didn't like kcalc. It contained a very lame pyqt script showing a (IMHO) nicer calculator. Strangely, that lead to two very cool implementations of the concept! ...

Nuevamente este año voy a estar en CafeConf . Es una charla de 45 minutos sobre PyQt el 13 de octubre al mediodía. ...

CherryPy is a cool, pythonic, simple, quick, fun way to write web applications. ...

A Little History ...

For a bunch of apps I write, I often want to be able to add a systray icon. ...

Well, reading in planetkde about how nice data aware widgets would be, I have to say this: ...

I am, as always, playing with stuff. And I was faced with a problem I must have solved a dozen times before: Given a list of items with obvious hierarchical names (say, a list of folders), turn it into a reasonable data structure. ...

I have been writing web-based interfaces for applications for about 5 years. Nothing public, nothing very interesting, just tiny front ends for custom tools in clients' installations. ...

I am no fan of source-based distributions. I think that for most practical purposes, a distribution where installing KDE takes over a day (I own a lowly Duron as my fast computer) is useless. ...

Trac is cool. Easy to set up, easy to run, low maintenance, and you get: ...

I wrote a little spreadsheet thingie a few days ago. [1] ...

I have been playing with this code and it's been lots of fun. ...

As I mentioned before, I was at the 3rd CafeLUG event on friday and saturday. ...

... oh, screw it, why not say what it doesn't need? It's better for my blood pressure. ...

Python code really doesn't look good on planetkde, so follow the link to my page to see it right if you are there ;-) ...

As I blogged earlier I am writing a game (and yes, it's pretty much playable already). ...

As I blogged earlier I am writing a game (and yes, it's pretty much playable already). ...

From Speno's Pythonic Avocado. ...

Does such a thing exist? There are dozens, but none seems very good. ...

It has been way too long without posting a longer item, so... I recicled a script I wrote for a customer, and here it is: ...

I am trying to do something which is, I think, pretty cool, in python. ...

In a whim, I checked out kdebindings/dcoppython from KDE's CVS. ...

There's a problem often used to show the unintuitive nature of probability, which has become very well known. ...

It's better than I remember. Specially because the SF CVS version is newer than all the copies I had on disk (I wonder how that happened). ...

Since I uploaded Notty to Sourceforge (get it from CVS), I thought it would be nice to show what it looks like nowadays. ...

This is a recipe at the Python CookBook showing how to add a new directive to reStructuredText, called code-block, which syntax-highlights the block! ...

Looks like the programming tutorial was well received. About 5000 hits in 12 hours :-) ...

Now, this is not a tutorial in the sense that you gonna learn how to do stuff. ...

Nice article by Robin Miller at Newsforge. ...

Ok, here it goes. If you are not fluent in Qt programming the following entry will make no sense whatsoever :-) ...

Now, I didn't expect this to work at all! ...

Using python, it's trivial to turn any module into a XMLRPC server. So, if you are careful writing your app in a modular way, you can move the backend elsewhere in very little code. ...

Implementing proper updating is simple in that sending stuff to PyDS is simple. However, having the GUI do the right thing is tricky: ...

Lacks lots of stuff, but the UI is pretty much done. ...

I always dread the moment when a package has to be shared, and something distributable has to be made. You know, don't forget any files, and such. ...

Linuxtoday.com and linux.com linked to it. A couple of mistakes pointed out and fixed. Switched to py2html python code while I was at it. ...

In the python listing at the end of the article, I applied py2html so it would get syntax highlighting. ...

Nice post at mechanicalcat.net, about why python makes good programming easier, or at least not harder. ...

My Internet connection is very flaky right now (damn you, Velocom!), so working in KRsN is just no fun. Therefore, I diverted some of the programming energy towards an old project, called Uqbar. ...

The python shelve module is too limiting for the database needs of KRsN, so I'm moving it to SQLite and PySQLite. ...

I just committed changes that make KFTE work on KDE 3.1 For anyone who likes FTE , a traditional programmer's editor from OS/2 (and DOS, and Mac, and X, and linux console, and pretty much everywhere :-), this version provides a pure Qt and a KDE version. ...

Well, if you are one of the 6 who actually checked the link in the previous entry, you will know I am writing a news aggregator ;-) ...

Well, 6 months without posting an entry. I must confess I was pretty pissed at some people around here at the time (note to self: maybe putting my real email address here is not such a good idea. Some people are really scary). ...