Posts in Lateral Opinion about programming

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. ...

2004-06-03 10:22:08

There Goes Captain Beto, Through Space

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

2004-03-28 15:52:48

Custom widgets using PyQt

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

2004-03-01 14:36:00

Opening and Saving Files made easier.

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 :-) ...

2004-02-09 15:18:40

Interface Designers and Free Software: A Realistic Proposal

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

2004-02-03 13:02:08

Cooperative Qt apps using GNU pth

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

2004-02-02 18:09:20

PyBrowser: a nicer QTextBrowser

...

2004-01-09 19:16:32

Rapid Application development using PyQt and Eric3 ... in realtime!

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

2003-12-28 18:32:48

Hinges and integration

Why integration matters for development ...

2008-09-07 21:13:08

This week's release plan: Uqbar

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

2008-09-05 18:38:43

rst2pdf 0.7is out, better than ever!

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

2008-09-04 11:08:43

rst2pdf: What will be new tomorrow

Keeping with my new time-based release schedule, tomorrow is again rst2pdf release day! What will be new in 0.7? Several things! ...

2008-09-02 23:49:01

rst2pdf: progress in smartframe branch

Yes, it is getting better. Now there are left-floating or right-floating elements, and you can float pretty much anything (except literal blocks, that's a problem) by using the class directive. Here's how it looks: ...

2008-08-31 23:01:50

rst2pdf: smartframes branch

Today I started a branch called SmartFrames. The main goal is to achieve a better text flow in the document (for example, for sidebars), and it is starting to get there, slowly. ...

2008-08-30 03:00:34

rst2pdf 0.6 is out, get it while it's hot!

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. ...

2008-08-28 23:26:36

Rstpdf wil be released again tomorrow. And it's a good release.

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

2008-08-27 23:46:35

How pretty is rst2pdf's output? Take a look.

I am a big Alexandre Dumas fan. He's the direct ancestor of Neal Stephenson, so many of you should like him too. So I used one of his best books to try some automatic typesetting of project gutenberg texts. ...

2008-08-25 14:42:11

rst2pdf: release fever!

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

2008-08-24 13:33:38

rstpdf love: syntax highlighting

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. ...

2008-08-24 10:11:15

This friday will see a new rst2pdf release

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. ...

2008-08-23 20:26:06

Some more rst2pdf love, time-based releases of my code

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

2008-08-22 23:08:14

Creating PDF Reports with Python and Restructured Text

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

2008-08-22 17:51:47

Giving rst2pdf some love

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

2008-08-20 11:34:07

Lessons learned in a month of hobby programming

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. ...

2008-08-13 13:01:19

I'm irrationaly proud of this email

Just sent it to Python Argentina: ...

2008-08-12 22:22:55

uRSSus: is that an icon in your pocket?

Yes, sometimes I think a feature is much harder than it really is. ...

2008-08-12 21:46:07

urssus at 27 days old

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 ;-) ...

2008-08-11 11:06:28

Urssus goes meta!

I have been delaying this functionality because I expected it to be hard to do, then... it was very easy! Now you can create " metafeeds " based on queries. Here's the first example: " Post.important==True " . ...

2008-08-11 10:34:56

Pickling can be expensive

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

2008-08-08 22:55:56

uRSSus: first post 0.2.10 features (has screenie)

It's running prety stable (at least for me) so I decided to fix some issues and add some features. First a screenshot: ...

2008-08-08 14:41:14

uRSSus 0.2.10 is out!

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

2008-08-06 17:12:47

uRSSus: now with configuration dialog goodness!

I felt that a " user-friendly " configuration dialog for uRSSus was not a good way to spend effort, because I expect options to change often for a while, and I didn't want an outdated dialog, either. The solution? Autogenerate a mediocre configuration dialog! ...

2008-08-04 15:43:58

Urssus: Sorry about 0.2.9

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

2008-08-03 19:35:59

Urssus: 0.2.9 is out

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

2008-08-03 01:39:23

Urssus: import from google reader

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. ...

2008-08-02 23:02:35

Urssus: August 2nd - going small

Mostly, I spent my two hours today refactoring. But also, testing how uRSSus looks on a small screen. Take a look: ...

2008-08-01 18:29:09

Urssus: no release today

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

2008-07-31 22:53:30

Urssus: July 31st - Many small things (with not-too-cool screenshot)

Helped by the testing by vgarvardt, many issues and possible features have been fixed or implemented in the last two days. Here's an incomplete list: ...

2008-07-30 21:06:00

Urssus: July 30th (way too late). Now with users!

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. ...

2008-07-30 06:45:59

Urssus: July 30th (way too early). new feature - twitter!

I have a twitter account. I never found a use for it. ...

2008-07-29 22:53:43

Hello, future Roberto, here's a hand!

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 ;-) ...

2008-07-29 15:51:00

Urssus: July 29th - Moo till it's done

I may have gotten a bit carried away with mootools: Combined view now has an accordion-like thing google-reader style. ...

2008-07-29 11:42:13

Urssus: July 29th - An original feature, at last (with screenshot)

Tired of chasing after other program's features, I took a detour on the original feature road: the combined view is now much nicer than Akregator's. ...

2008-07-29 00:20:51

Urssus: July 28th late at night - Released 0.2.0 and it's outdated already (with screenshots)

Yes, I released 0.2.0, and announced it on PyPI, Freshmeat and kde-apps.org, we'll see what happens. ...

2008-07-28 16:33:01

Urssus: July 28th - Cleanup

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

2008-07-27 22:00:42

Urssus: July 27th - Released into the wild!

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 ...

2008-07-26 00:04:05

Urssus: July 25th (way too late) - new features

Last post for the day, and probably until monday. ...

2008-07-25 14:33:05

Urssus: July 25th (later) - uRSSus on windows

Image: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3212/2701090703_79e26937a1_m.jpg urssus8 by Roberto Alsina ...

2008-07-25 12:55:32

Urssus: July 25th - approaching parity

My stated goal of Akregator feature parity is looking even better. With screenshot! ...

2008-07-24 13:49:40

Urssus: July 24th

When I started this project I wrote: ...

2008-07-23 09:29:51

Urssus: July 23rd (early)

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

2008-07-22 16:48:28

Urssus: July 22nd / looking good

Today it was a bit more than two hours, but spread in 10 minute chunks, which is not exactly efficient. ...

2008-07-20 17:44:20

Urssus: July 20th / eating my own dogfood

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

2008-07-19 08:43:39

Urssus: July 19th

I confess I cheated and kept working on it yesterday after the blog post. OTOH, I will not touch it today ;-). Big functionality added, too. ...

2008-07-18 15:43:15

Urssus again

Another day, another two hours of work on it. ...

2008-07-17 16:21:00

Urssus improves

Today's 2 hours: ...

2008-07-16 21:44:13

A programming challenge for myself

I worked on uRSSus for a couple of hours again, and it's working pretty nicely. ...

2008-07-15 23:38:36

The world lamest GUI newsreader... in 130 LOC

I started this as an experiment to see how hard it was to build apps using QT and Elixir. This is how it looks after two hours of coding: ...

2008-06-26 14:56:26

Creating and sending nice HTML+Text mails from python

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. ...

2008-06-20 14:23:13

Adding MSN notifications to Argus

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! ...

2008-06-16 22:27:06

Kid, wanna try a WM?

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

2008-04-23 22:20:34

My first impressions of Google App Engine

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. ...

2008-04-21 10:36:33

Cool, I got my google app engine invitation!

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

2008-04-15 16:14:36

Linux as a windows crutch: Sending SMS

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

2008-04-09 14:06:41

A simple memcache memoizer for python>=2.2

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!) ...

2008-03-09 12:54:23

Playing with GIT

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. ...

2008-03-07 07:43:47

New qmail plugin idea: overload

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. ...

2008-02-25 18:31:11

Weird Django/PyODB bug

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

2008-02-18 10:06:34

Text-based presentations

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. ...

2008-02-12 12:15:16

Open with: Google Docs

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. ...

2008-02-09 12:02:44

rst2pdf: New and improved

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

2008-02-05 19:44:02

Rebelling against insanity: Wicd requires half of GNOME

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

2007-12-28 12:46:19

Thinking in 800x480: Web browsing

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. ...

2007-11-30 09:29:39

Qmail public domain? Cool!!!!

According to Slashdot , at least. ...

2007-11-28 15:51:51

If you are a qmail user: read this

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

2007-11-28 14:01:26

Rethinking Linux Configuration: Part I

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

2007-11-23 21:23:45

My seal of approval!

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. ...

2007-11-23 17:32:48

Wanted: C programmer

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

2007-11-15 16:23:59

Bash does thing I never suspected.

Try this and be amazed: ...

2007-11-13 10:12:14

Windows: my eXPerience

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

2007-11-05 17:34:07

Coming soon...

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

2007-10-18 17:37:34

Use YUI RTE.

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

2007-10-17 16:04:55

I am not explaining this screenshot.

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

2007-10-15 12:37:38

rst2pdf: now with working tables

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: ...

2007-10-15 09:23:11

Maybe I should write an office suite.

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 " .) ...

2007-10-11 08:30:14

rst2pdf again

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

2007-10-06 11:26:17

Done with rst2pdf for now

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

2007-10-05 22:26:08

Generating PDFs from Restructured text

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

2007-10-02 14:11:35

Everything is still around

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 . ...

2007-09-14 18:35:12

New library: ChipScene

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

2007-09-10 07:54:58

What I learned at PyWeek

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? ...

2007-09-06 15:27:42

A little further on TLB

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

2007-09-06 08:43:31

First pic of TLB

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

2007-09-05 17:01:08

PyWeek progress: the 4 hour mark

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. ...

2007-09-05 09:46:55

PyWeek5

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

2007-08-13 17:59:11

Django, the view from a parachute

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. ...

2007-08-08 10:59:55

Be afraid, young pumpkins!

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

2007-08-08 09:05:17

Me and FLOSS in the late '90s

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. ...

2007-08-07 08:21:29

Fixing old tutorials

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. ...

2007-08-06 17:44:28

If you try to use quotactl on Linux...

Always remember to do this: ...

2007-08-06 09:57:47

A bit sad about this

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

2007-08-04 14:49:35

Coming ideas

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. ...

2007-07-23 15:59:14

Rater progresses (slowly)

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). ...

2007-07-11 20:10:58

Snow and rates

Monday was a very special day: ...

2007-07-05 11:07:21

Quote of the day (ok, of May 21st, 2007, but I only saw it today)

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. ...

2007-07-04 10:06:49

The Linux software ecosystem is boring and a little lame (a rant).

Quick, answer this: ...

2007-06-20 13:23:33

Old READMEs: Atlast... make everything programmable!

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? ...

2007-06-04 13:42:47

Sometimes, you need to do it the hard way.

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

2007-05-30 14:05:52

Almost a real spreadsheet! (with video)

I was able to hack a bit at StupidSheet this morning, and there are some real advances. ...

2007-05-29 09:19:08

Stupid Sheet: Redoing cell displacements

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. ...

2007-05-26 13:01:06

LINA: Intriguing

It promises: ...

2007-05-25 19:06:51

A graph is a graph is a graph.

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? " ...

2007-05-24 18:02:53

New software project: Stupid Sheet

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. ...

2007-05-23 18:31:11

The python spreadsheet: Another look (Traxter DSL)

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

2007-05-22 10:18:14

PyCells: The Python SpreadSheet redux

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

2007-05-21 20:57:12

Excel formula parsers are hell

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

2007-05-20 22:37:03

Why I use Arch Linux

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

2007-05-18 14:25:05

Small software released: RA-WebPass

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. ...

2007-05-15 12:44:44

BartleBlog change: Mako Templates

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

2007-05-11 12:01:45

New Bartleblog Feature: Menu Editor

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

2007-05-11 08:59:46

Python Trick: Save anything in config files

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. ...

2007-05-10 14:07:26

Today's first hour of hacking...

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

2007-05-09 15:06:20

Today's two hours of hacking

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

2007-05-08 21:05:03

Making your QTextBrowser show remote images

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

2007-05-08 17:44:46

PHP is for Lucre (II)

I probably should have charged more. ...

2007-05-05 18:29:56

Giving BartleBlog the push it needs

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

2007-05-04 15:03:04

PHP is for lucre. Filthy, filthy lucre.

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

2007-05-01 19:39:22

What I am plotting...

...nothing. ...

2007-04-27 13:30:44

BOP: Ball Oriented programming

Some of you may be familiar with weird programming languages. Some of you may even know about bidimensional languages. Some of you may have seen Flip , where computation is performed by balls bouncing off things. ...

2007-04-15 23:12:52

Y el gurú bajó de la montaña y dijo...

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

2007-04-14 23:37:24

New project: Tobogan

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. ...

2007-04-12 17:35:52

New BartleBlog Feature: marketspeak!

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();}"><< </span> <span id="next" onClick="if (current <numPages-1) { next();}"> >></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 <<a class="reference" href="mailto:ralsina@kde.org">ralsina@kde.org</a>></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">'YnllIHdvcmxkIQ=='</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 ...

2007-04-10 23:13:01

Son of BartleBlog XIV: Moo

A new gadget: Mootools based menus. ...

2007-04-08 12:58:56

Using TinyURL in python

Isn't this neat? ...

2007-04-05 14:37:33

Son of bartleblog XI: the highlight of the syntax

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

2007-03-30 08:41:52

Son of Bartlebog VII: the nuclear test site

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

2007-03-29 18:43:28

Son of Bartleblog VI: The flickr directive

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

2007-03-28 17:28:48

Son of bartleblog 5: Menus

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

2007-03-27 12:49:20

Son of Bartleblog IV

Another morning, another feature: archive ...

2007-03-26 18:28:32

Son of Bartleblog III

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

2007-03-25 12:53:36

Son of Bartlebog II

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

2007-03-24 09:16:00

A little project, son of BartleBlog

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. ...

2007-03-13 11:04:48

RaSPF on its way to release

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

2007-03-06 14:23:12

C is not Python II.

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

2007-03-04 21:10:40

The middle path

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

2007-03-04 14:21:04

This can't be good

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). ...

2007-03-01 13:46:56

My SPF library kinda works

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

2007-02-13 11:56:00

C is not Python

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

2007-02-12 23:31:28

Any regex wizard reading this?

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

2007-02-09 12:38:40

Playing with literate programming

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

2007-02-06 23:05:52

Itching.

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

2006-11-17 11:04:48

To the other three guys (or gals)....

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

2006-11-07 12:15:12

rst2rst gets tables!

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

2006-11-02 23:20:48

rst2rst works (80% or so)

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. ...

2006-10-17 21:06:24

No, I don't get a dime from them

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

2006-10-05 13:38:24

A different UNIX Part II: A better shell language

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! ...

2006-06-07 11:41:04

Eating like a Python, for Python, and other stuff

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

2006-05-23 19:28:16

A silly entry

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. ...

2006-05-20 13:00:00

Python-v4l: neat!

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 . ...

2006-05-17 08:29:04

Flickr Banners

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. ...

2006-05-16 00:20:32

Using runit is even simpler

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

2006-05-11 08:37:36

If you see a russian, it's my doing

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. . ! ...

2006-05-08 23:40:00

I Jornada Python en Santa Fe, Argentina

Bilingual entry here: ...

2006-05-02 15:44:16

FaxWeb is done

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

2006-04-22 16:07:44

Now I remember why I don't like C++

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

2006-04-17 14:55:12

The missing language

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

2006-04-02 01:56:32

BPython Lives!!!

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. ...

2006-01-27 22:04:00

Silly idea to make Python popular

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

2006-01-24 22:10:24

My first interesting hack

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

2005-12-30 14:25:20

My first time

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! ...

2005-12-29 20:04:32

Ok, here is how you write the shortest one

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

2005-12-28 09:50:08

Python Contest

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

2005-12-20 12:25:52

Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python (or Ruby)

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

2005-12-16 14:27:28

Bound by Smoke I

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 ;-). ...

2005-12-12 19:47:28

Ok, so, I am a lazy guy

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

2005-10-18 00:46:08

A simple question

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. ...

2005-10-17 17:30:56

A real programming challenge.

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! ...

2005-10-11 11:15:28

CafeConf 2005

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

2005-09-09 19:34:40

Authenticated Pages in CherryPy

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

2005-09-02 23:16:32

Small Linux Revisited

A Little History ...

2005-08-04 21:27:44

Not letting stuff fall off the ' net

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

2005-05-14 16:22:40

Data aware widgets in KDE

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

2005-05-10 21:29:52

Extreme code reuse

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. ...

2005-04-08 23:59:12

Sometimes things just click

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. ...

2005-03-15 23:59:12

Source-based distributions, the good side.

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. ...

2005-03-08 23:59:12

Trac is cool. Cherrypy is cooler.

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

2004-12-14 19:00:32

This is why dynamic languages are cool

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

2004-12-07 19:02:40

Not a calculator

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

2004-11-15 02:20:00

On speaking and slides

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

2004-11-10 15:16:32

What linux needs on the desktop is...

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

2004-10-13 16:24:48

On other news today...

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

2004-10-13 16:03:28

Adventures in Hi-Fi

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

2004-10-13 16:03:28

Adventures in Hi-Fi

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

2004-09-30 10:34:56

My eyes, my eyes!

From Speno's Pythonic Avocado. ...

2004-09-24 12:10:56

A good web-based password changer?

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

2004-05-21 20:21:36

Qmail Address Lister

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: ...

2004-05-09 15:42:08

Hard Python question

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

2004-03-23 16:48:16

Dcoppython

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

2004-03-08 11:51:44

Goats and cars

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

2004-02-02 20:34:24

And so does uqbar

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). ...

2004-01-27 13:34:08

Screenshot of Notty today

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

2004-01-24 11:36:48

Neat stuff

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! ...

2004-01-10 13:06:24

Whoa. Hits!

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

2004-01-09 19:16:32

Rapid Application development using PyQt and Eric3 ... in realtime!

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

2004-01-05 19:01:36

Using linux without the CLI (Newsforge)

Nice article by Robin Miller at Newsforge. ...

2003-11-04 20:06:40

Confused by QMimeSourceFactory

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

2003-10-27 17:33:04

Post-facto inheritance

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

2003-10-09 19:41:04

Nifty python/xmlrpc thing

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. ...

2003-09-30 21:52:16

Baby steps

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

2003-09-29 22:15:44

Almost a useful app

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

2003-09-28 19:22:56

Now, that was easy!

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. ...

2003-09-23 18:05:04

Qmail Article picked

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. ...

2003-09-22 20:13:04

py2html trial

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

2003-09-21 17:28:48

Why python is nice

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

2003-03-30 21:39:28

Progress...

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. ...

2003-03-26 21:52:16

Moving to SQLite

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

2003-03-22 11:37:52

Some programming

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. ...

2003-03-08 23:29:20

What I am writing

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 ;-) ...

2001-03-26 14:15:58

Advogato post for 2001-03-26 14:15:58

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). ...

programming

Articles tagged programming

Posts tagged programming