This month's PyGTA we will have three presenters talking about their upcoming PyCon talks. Leigh Honeywell will be presenting Teaching Python in Your Community -- her experience teaching a Python class at HackLabTO. Greg Wilson on What We've Learned From Building Basie -- what a bunch of undergraduates accomplished building a Django-based replacement for Trac called Basie. Mike C. Fletcher on Debating 'til Dawn -- will be presenting some of the best discussion/ideas/talks at PyGTA the last three years in his attempt to make PyCon cool again.
Remember to bring your laptop because Mike will have a Real-time feedback tool for chatting with the presenters and give feedback on their talks (he has been") working for the last three months).
I ordered a second Linode (a 360) on the weekend for some PHP applications (Fever and DokuWiki). I have been with many VPS services and Linode is by far the best you can buy (shared host I will have to say Nearly Free Speech). It is hosted in the same data centre (Newark, NJ) so I have an internal IP address connecting both of them. I am running Nagios and Munin on both computers (Panda is monitoring Fox and Fox is monitoring Panda) that way if one goes down the other will notify me.
I also moved my Wiki from DokuWiki to Hatta. Hatta is a really simple wiki engine written in Python that use Mercurial for storage. Which means I just have to clone a repository to edit a page (you can clone the my draft wiki or my published wiki). I am going to miss some of the more powerful features of DokuWiki so I have started working on my own wiki engine called Episteme.
Episteme will have some of my favorite feature of DokuWiki, Hatta, Confluence, and Yaki.
An Email from Panic
I signed up for Transmit's Beta and it looks like they had a lot of people signed up and now the Beta program is full. So they sent me an email informing me:
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Lighthouse strange UI
I started using Lighthouse (a ticket tracker) a few days ago for Asgard, iDelicious, and a few other personal projects (while I wait for a new server to run Jira. Initial thoughts are it a really good, simple, easy to use ticket track. But as you can see from the screenshot below I always forget where the Add new Ticket button is located. I look left under the bar that has a bunch of New actions but I start freaking out because I don't see New ticket, then I remember to look right where their is a prominent button that say Create new ticket.
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Last night at PyGTA, Mike gave a short talk/demo about his
findings using Tornado and CouchDB to write a
real time chat and voting application for his PyCon talk.
Tornado is a lightweight non-blocking web server created by
FriendFeed and Open Source by Facebook. The API is similar
to web.py and App Engine's webapp framework. Mike's ending comments was that Tornado can out perform Twisted. But
he found he had to write a lot of code to do things that were built
into Twisted (or any other modern web framework) already.
His thoughts on CouchDB:
I'm really beginning to regret the choice of CouchDB for the
back-end. It's working perfectly well, but I have literally dozens
of pieces of code hanging around for doing SQL-based paging... none
of which are applicable to CouchDB.
*Referenced: Things I'd like to play with (given enough time)*
This website (and a few other sites I manage) will be moving from
Apache 2 and WSGI to Tornado and Nginx #. It
will still be built on top of Django thought so most of the
issues Mike was talking about wouldn't apply to me.
Other people who wrote about this event:
I recently installed Geektool on my MacBook Pro. I used so many sources to set it up that I thought it would be a good idea that I write a blog post about some of the more complicated configurations.
Sunrise & Sunset
I am getting the sunrise & sunset data from weather undergroup mobile website.
Sunrise
curl --silent http://m.wund.com/global/stations/71265.html | grep 'Sunrise' | sed -e :a -e 's/]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | sed -e 's/Sunrise/Sunrise: /g' | sed -e 's/EST//g'
Sunset
curl --silent http://m.wund.com/global/stations/71265.html | grep 'Sunset' | sed -e :a -e 's/]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | sed -e 's/Sunset/Sunset: /g' | sed -e 's/EST//g'
IP Addresses
Weather Image
Weather Forecast
I am using Yahoo Weather to get the weather image.
curl --silent "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=CAXX0504&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|C<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's///' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's///' -e 's///' -e 's///' -e 's///'</b>
