Linoleum

Using Haml in Django Projects

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 08:18:00 +1100

Haml is a markup language used for generating HTML, without using inline coding; it's designed to rectify several problems with traditional HTML templating systems.

Haml is big in the Ruby world, but is now gaining traction in the Python sphere too; here's an article from Stephen Jackson on using Haml in Django.

A guide to Python packaging

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 06:04:00 +1100

When developing software, it's important to package your software properly. There's nothing more annoying for the end-user than software that doesn't install or involves considerable manual work before it can be used. Python has a very flexible packaging system - distutils - and Patrick T. Altman has written a guide for using it.

The Python Standard Library by Example

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 06:39:00 +1100

Linux Journal have printed chapter 3 of the book The Python Standard Library By Example, covering algorithms.

Introduction to C on Linux

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:53:00 +1100

Linux Career has started a series on C development on Linux. The first article gives a brief history on the C programming language, explains what tools you'll need to get into it, and shows you how to compile your first C program.

Facebook Application Development

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 06:12:00 +1100

Writing in Linux Journal, Mike Diehl describes a few methods for < href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/facebook-application-development">getting data into and out of Facebook.

Dropbox with Perl

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:13:00 +1100

Linux Magazine are running a piece on using Perl to access Dropbox (PDF only). The article demonstrates the use of the Mojolicious::Lite and Net::Dropbox::API modules and outlines some scripts for connecting to and querying your Dropbox account.

Data mining Twitter, using Ruby

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:55:00 +1100

Developer works are running a fantastic article on how to use Ruby to mine Twitter for data. It comes complete with examples on how to find the locations of your followers, extract information about Twitter users, and looking at the behaviour of twitter users.

New series on learning shell scripting.

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:49:48 +1100

For anyone who is new to the Unix world, Linux Magazine is running a series of articles on learning shell scripting. Part one introduces the basics, while part two introduces while loops.

Using glade3/gtkbuilder with Ruby

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:23:00 +1100

There's very few examples of how to use Glade3 with Ruby, so after an hour of trial and error, I've put together this simple HelloWorld program that shows how to use it:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby



require 'rubygems'

require 'gtk2'



class HelloGlade

  attr :glade



  def initialize

    if _FILE_ == $0

      Gtk.init

      builder = Gtk::Builder::new

      builder.add_from_file("hello.xml")

      builder.connect_signals{ |handler| method(handler) }

      @window = builder.get_object("window1")

      @window.show()

      Gtk.main

    end

  end

  def gtk_main_quit

    puts "Gtk.main_quit"

    Gtk.main_quit()

  end

end



hello = HelloGlade.new





This can be used with the following XML file:



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<interface>

  <requires lib="gtk+" version="2.24"/>

  <object class="GtkWindow" id="window1">

    <property name="can_focus">False</property>

    <child>

      <object class="GtkButton" id="button1">

        <property name="label" translatable="yes">button</property>

        <property name="visible">True</property>

        <property name="can_focus">True</property>

        <property name="receives_default">True</property>

        <property name="use_action_appearance">False</property>

      </object>

    </child>

  </object>

</interface>

Using textile markup in Django

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:45:00 +1000

Django provides the django.contrib.markup module for marking up text, but unfortunately, the documentation on it is pretty light. Here's a quick guide to using it:

Firstly, you'll need the Python Textile module - on Debian or Ubuntu, install the python-textile package.

Then, add django.contrib.databrowse to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.

At the top of the template that you want to use the markup in, load in the module with:

{% load markup %}

...but make sure it goes after any extends calls.

Now, you can markup any text variables by adding |textile to them. For example:

{{ country.notes|textile }

Lazy user signup for Django

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:13:34 +1000

If you're writing web applications, you've probably found that a user registration page is an anathema to new users - they see a registration form, and it's just too much effort to bother filling in, so they leave.

In order to combat this, Dan Fairs has written django-lazysignup, a Django module that will automatically create a new user for every person who visits your site, which they can later use to create themselves a real account, without losing any of the data that they've used with the site so far.

lxml: High-performance Python XML parsing

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:55:29 +1100

Learn how to process large-volume xml data sets in Python using lxml, with this in-depth tutorial from IBM Developerworks.

Porting Perl to Python

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:20:10 +1000

IBM Developerworks have published a brief article on porting Perl code to Python.

Perl: reading from a string, as if it was a file

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:51:00 +1100

This seems fairly obvious, but somehow, even after fifteen years of Perl exposure, I've only just cottoned on to it now, so presumably this might be of assistance to other people.

Recently, I needed to read data line by line from a string (rather than from a file). You'd think that this would be a fairly common requirement, but evidently I've managed to either avoid it or fudge it up until now.

Anyway, there was no getting around it this time, but it turns out to be rather simple - just pass a reference to the variable when calling open():

my $text = "Some long text"; open(TEXT,"<", \$text); while(<TEXT>) { # do whatever } close(TEXT);

That's all there is to it!

Potential language changes for JDK7

nospam@example.com (Paul) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:17:00 +1100

Jeremy Manson summarises some changes to the Java language that have been proposed as a result of a call by Sun for submissions.