lunatechian (lunatech-ian) - geek stuff

Release of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. SuperSunday release

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 19:50:41 +0200

What is PythonOnPlanes ?

PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

See the Features list below to learn more about the framework.

Release Announcement

The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 , the latest release of the PythonOnPlanes Stable development branch. Since PythonOnPlanes-1.3.06 release we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and mod_snake_oil support for Apache web servers, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes.

Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer officially debuting on the x86 platform.

Features

The software development world is moving towards AGILE DEVELOPMENT, WEB-2.OH, GURU PRESENCE and LEAN SOFTWARE. Our Framework is geared to support all these features.

"Out of the box" features available

Out of the box PythonOnPlanes supports

Sprint Management
Pair programming using an editor that can be shared by 2 developers. We have named it ALN (Analog Large Notebook)
LoC2LoC to generate a report on each developer's productivity.
Active Suggest DESIGN PATTERN (ASDP). This feature will make your refactoring efforts a snap

Beta Experimental Features

These features are not enabled by default and you have to enable them by editing the configuration file.

Developers' Blog . Each developer in the team is given a blog which he can update. If enabled, PythonOnPlanes will generate a daily report of the developer activity log and post it on the blog too
CutesyErrorMessages-0.0.1-BETA. This replaces stern error messages with very user friendly messages

GET PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 IN NO TIME

Download PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 from <http://pythononplanes.com/>

RIP John W. Backus

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:34:22 +0100

The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times

perl oops

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 05:22:24 +0100

For a language which is so great, it is amazing how fscked up perl's oops is

fun with about:*

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:29:23 +0100

Mozilla family of browser supports a variety about: commands. Today I searched inside the source code to see where they have been implemented and the complete list of the commands it supports. Here is the list Firefox supports. Type these urls in your Firefox browser for countless hours of fun (for very low values of fun).

about:config
about:credits
about:plugins
about:mozilla
about:logo
about:buildconfig
about:license
about:licence
about:about
about:neterror

Link: source code

ingenious use of the HL engine

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:03:01 +0100

This looks very obvious in hindsight, but I am sure not many would have thought about this. This guy uses the HL's source engine to produced a model of the Kaufmann House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the Source Engine, as opposed to more traditional Architectural Software, allows the use of dynamic lighting and a real-time walkthrough of the scene in high resolution.

Links: the HL map for Kaufmann House and a walk through available here

mysql slave problem

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 13:55:34 +0100

If you are seeing the line received 0 length packet from server, apparent master shutdown in your mysqld.err file (when your mysql server is a slave), check the server-id of the machines which are replicating from the same server. Most likely, you will find that there are boxes which have the same server-id

having trouble reddit's rss on bloglines ?

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:47:27 +0100

If you use Bloglines and you have not been seeing any updates from Reddit on it then try to get your reddit feed from this rssmix feed. I have no idea why Bloglines is not showing updated feeds from reddit.

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 20:27:43 +0100

I was just reading a very interesting article from Jeremy Allison of the samba team called The Land of "Nothing for free". A very interesting quote

My panel was rather uncontroversial, Microsoft, Bruce Perens and myself being on our best behavior. The only sparks that flew where when Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.

The article is old, but do check it out.

automatically subscribing to new folders in gnus

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:09:59 +0100

If you use gnus to read your imap, you might find this useful. Gnus does not automatically show new folders created in your IMAP server. However, you can get this behavior by using the gnus-auto-subscribed-groups variable. In my .gnus, I added this (setq gnus-auto-subscribed-groups "INBOX.*") and voila! all my new folders started showing up.

afd-speak

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:25:45 +0100

"friends, romans, countrymen, lend me your ear" translated to Doglas Adams fan-speak "Friends, afdaniains, furry creatures. Lend me your babelfish." - seen in alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup (afd) afdaniains refers to the regular posters of afd.

Yet another expansion for IRC

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 07:02:57 +0100

Alternative expansions for IRC (as seen in the #phpc@irc.freenode.net)

Tetraboy :  Internet Relax Chat
lig           : Instant Resource chat

emails and IM

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 04:27:23 +0100

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .

s9y's xml-rpc interface

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:52:39 +0100

I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.

iWoz

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:25:28 +0100

If you have not yet read the book iWoz, you have to go out and get this book and read it cover to cover. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. Woz is an excellent storyteller and his tone of writing is conversational. Every engineer should read this book. It tells the stories of sleepless nights and how much they are worth. It talks about persistence and passion and how they really make a difference. One of the profound statements that Woz makes is " I chose to be happy ". The book ends with Woz's thoughts on being a great engineer:

Dont waver.
See things in gray-scale.
Work alone.
Trust your instincts.

One surprising thing in the book is the absence of any mention of the EFF, of which Woz was one of the founders.

BloGTK & tags

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:24:10 +0200

Test post to see if BloGTK can post to LJ and use tags too.

Update: As expected, that did not work