LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy. A handy little tool that cleans up various inconsistencies in text encodings after something has gone wrong. This is of course no substitute for correct use of encodings in Python, but sometimes you get your input from external sources (or have legacy data from old programs from times when the whole Unicode stuff was not yet so well developed) and have no influence on how the data looks - in that case, this is a very practical little tool.
Linkblog - 18.6.2012 - 28.8.2012
kmike/marisa-trie. Very practical - there are quite a few things done in Python with Dicts that actually belong in other structures. Especially the prefix search and the search for existing prefixes is practical. And all of this with a C extension also quite fast.
Arduino - MacOSX. What fascinates me about Arduino: the simple interface of the IDE (which is just an enhanced Processing) and the pile of crazy projects around it, such as Digispark, a mini-board that can do less but is tiny and runs directly from the USB port. You can really think about things like water level sensors for plant irrigation or similar. With the prices for the mini-board, this becomes directly realistic.
myabc/markdownj I should check out, because JMD is somehow still a bit buggy and the developer is no longer doing anything with it. This is a port of the original Perl sources, so it heavily uses Regular Expressions, but that shouldn't really cause big problems with my UniversalBrain program structure, since I cache the HTML output. Maybe it behaves better than JMD. Although, of course, the question is whether it can be properly integrated as a library.
mitotic/otrace. Interesting alternative Python debugger designed for debugging and tracing multithreading applications. It's less about stepping sequentially through the Python code and more about analyzing an environment that dynamically changes through threads (the normal Python debugger is a bit cumbersome here).
Cletus/jmd. Since PegDown doesn't run on Android because the underlying parser wants to generate a dynamic parser class, which is not allowed there, take a look at this. It should also be quite comprehensive and is based on the Markdown# project for C#.
mitmel/SimpleContentProvider. Looks like a simple ORM that automatically generates an Android Content Provider. This makes the creation much slimmer in code.
sattvik/neko. Also noted for later, Clojure for programming Android applications with a few bindings for the Android APIs. Although the question remains whether they have tackled the startup problem, or if that still limits the use of Clojure.
ActionBarSherlock - Home. For later use: this allows you to use the ActionBar in code even on older Android versions, it automatically uses a backport if no native ActionBar is available.
sirthias/pegdown. Interesting Markdown implementation in Java, based on a real parser and not the usual ad-hoc parsers or collections of regular expressions. Could be an interesting starting point for me, especially since it also comes as an Idea project and I should be able to integrate it quite easily.
n8han/giter8. And another practical tool, not necessarily Scala-related, but very useful: templates stored on GitHub are used to set up project structures. There is also a template for Android projects that use Scala.
Getting started · jberkel/android-plugin Wiki. And here is the central element for Scala programming for Android. This provides various sbt commands that handle Android integration and delivery.
mpeltonen/sbt-idea. Hmm, interesting - an sbt plugin with which you can generate Idea project structures. With this, you can then use the IDE at the points where you want to use it on the same project. For example, for remote debug integration, the IDE is quite nice.
Android programming with Scala. A bit stilted language, but useful content. The article provides a nice overview of what you gain when using Scala for Android programming. I need to take a closer look at this myself, as typing in Java sometimes gets on my nerves. Additionally, a workflow with sbt and a normal editor sounds much leaner than the various Java IDE environments. And some Scala language features practically scream to be used in the Android environment (especially traits).
Postbox — Awesome Email. I was never really enthusiastic about Thunderbird, so the announcement that it would no longer be developed didn't bother me much. But the fact that Sparrow now belongs to Google and, according to the announcements, nothing more is to be expected from it, really annoyed me - it was one of the faster clients for gmail and also had usable feature support for it. The Apple Mail client is rather stiff in comparison. Postbox claims to support gmail features, so it might be worth a try if Sparrow can no longer be used reliably due to bit rot.
Facebook analyzes chats for crime fighting. Is this then under the project name "fully automatic informer"?
Sitaramc/gitolite. Nice little tool for easily setting up repositories that others should also have access to - management is done through a dedicated admin repository.
OrmLite - Lightweight Object Relational Mapping ORM Java Package. Let's take a closer look, an ORM that can also be used in Android. Programming SQLite directly with SQLiteDatabaseHelper just isn't that much fun for me. It's a bit too low-level.
Create a package for Android for Kivy. I think I need to take a closer look at Kivy. They are now working with Python for Android, their own Python distribution that brings a customized interpreter for Android and a coupling via Cython, NDK, and JNI to the Android SDK. This way, you can produce real APKs that can be installed normally on devices - but write everything that makes up the application itself in Python. Of course, the question remains how fast it will run - Python is interpreted after all. But it would definitely be interesting for tools, especially since you can also run Kivy applications more or less directly under desktop systems.
Plop: Low-overhead profiling for Python. I need to take a closer look at this, it could be very interesting for the company's servers, especially the low profiling overhead of only 2% sounds exciting. And the visualization is definitely one of the better ones for Python profilers.
Custom Drawn Interface/Android - Lazarus wiki. Hah, there is also quite a bit for FreePascal and Lazarus (the FP IDE with a touch of Delphi) regarding the programming of Android apps. It's all still a bit wobbly and hacky, but it's making progress. The idea is quite funny - a minimal Java app with minimal activity and then the integration of Pascal code via JNI. The idea there is to be able to continue using the LCL - the GUI library of Lazarus - so that you can program across systems. And you can then also use the built-in GUI Builder.
Basic4android Basic for Android - Rapid Application Development. Heh, nice, a kind of Visual Basic for Android. Unfortunately only for Windows. Too bad.
Android - Processing. Oh, that's interesting. The latest Processing 2.0 Alpha can also directly support Android - and it's really simple, just write a Processing app, switch to Android and use "Run on device" to bring it all to the device and start it there. That sounds really interesting for the typical small hacks, especially if you want to play around with graphics (that's the focus of Processing).
necessitas / Home / necessitas. Hmm, sounds quite interesting - a QT version for Android including an IDE for programming apps. Maybe I'll check it out when my Nexus is here.
Lion: Mobile Backup Turn off local Time Machine | Jan-Kaspar Münnich. No idea if I already had this, too lazy to search, but if the local Time Machine backups are annoying (e.g. with smaller SSDs, this is anything but practical, especially if you occasionally perform larger file operations), you can turn them off with tmutil disablelocal and turn them on with tmutil enablelocal. For example, when performing larger cleanup tasks, it makes sense to turn them off, even if you activate them later to have the additional work safety. Or you simply archive everything on the notebook in git or mercurial, then you naturally don't need local backups either.
Ymacs -- An Emacs-like editor for the Web. As the title says. Emacs now also boots in the browser. However, there is still no usable editor for Emacs.
Lumiya Viewer - About Lumiya. Very nice - a graphical SL and OpenSim client for Android. I must definitely try this out in a few days. For iOS, I still only know Pocket MV, but it can only do maps, chat, and stuff like that, no graphical rendering of the environment.
Soulvers Features | Acqualia. "Calculator" rethought. I wonder why so many desktop computer calculators desperately try to replicate the UI of old pocket calculators. On mobile devices, it makes sense - the pocket calculator UI with multi-function keys is quite efficient for such small form factors - but on the computer, I much more often simply use a Python shell or an iPython notebook. Soulver is a bit like that, only focused on classic calculations and with linking of lines, so that you can build spreadsheet-like solution sheets. Quite clever.
Samsung: Compact camera EX2F with extra bright lens - Golem.de. It then came completely unexpectedly out of the blue into play. I don't think anyone had it on their radar - if I were still looking for an interesting compact camera, this would be one of the more interesting devices alongside the Sony RX100. However, for me, the GF3 has now taken the place of compacts, and even the RX100 can't keep up with it.
iBookstore blocks Czernin anthology as ‘too explicit’. That's where all understanding stops - control fetishism and prudery don't go together. And unfortunately, no longer just of American origin - in .eu, the UK is just developing something like this as a "standard" for itself. Beautiful new dumbed-down world ...
Fuse4X – The Easiest and Fastest Way to Create File Systems for Mac OS X. MacFuse is currently going the way of the dodo, so there's a need for an alternative if you want to load userspace filesystems (e.g., if you want to mount an SSH server). This version also looks more interesting than OSXFuse, because OSXFuse primarily aims for compatibility with the old MacFuse, while Fuse4X primarily aims for compatibility with the Linux reference and should make porting userspace filesystems easier.
Epistle - Android Apps on Google Play. And another Markdown editor for Android, which is less Wiki and more a simple Markdown editor, but still quite interesting - it also comes with Dropbox support.
JWBs blog: Ema Personal Wiki for Android and Windows. Since I was just talking about Markdown - here's a personal wiki that uses Markdown for various systems, including Android. According to the description, it's quite similar to Vim Wiki.
OscarGodson/EpicEditor. That sounds interesting - a web editor that doesn't just produce HTML, but Markdown. Could be interesting for some projects.
Blackmagic Design: Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Wow, that thing is really cool. So to speak, the mirror-less video option for Canon, one could say - because it has an EF mount. It looks really sleek, the price of $3000 without SSD though.
Cloud Party. Sounds interesting - a bit like Second Life in the browser with WebGL. Seems to really focus on the core features of SL: building and customizing. I should try playing around with it.
Repo.js. I found the Source-Highlighter through this - a small jQuery plugin that easily embeds a GitHub repository into a website. Very practical if you want to integrate your projects into your own websites and don't want to hand over the entire website to GitHub.
isagalaev/highlight.js. Just stumbled upon it, a small JavaScript source highlighter that works with a language heuristic and thus does not require explicit specification of the language to be colored - it simply tries all languages and takes the one with the most recognized syntactic elements. There is also a jQuery VanGogh jQuery plugin for this.
ErlPort - Erlang port protocol for Python. A somewhat different approach to distributed communication is this module, which simply implements Erlang's built-in communication tools (ports and terms). With this, you can build systems that use Python or Erlang as the implementation language, depending on your needs.
Hurricane. Sounds interesting, it's a distributed messaging system that works with various languages and thus offers integration of different systems. Among other things, it includes Python with WSGI and Ruby with Rails, making a distributed system based on Rails and Django conceivable. Additionally, there is a process manager, with which the processes themselves only need to handle standard I/O and then can be directly managed by Hurricane. I could imagine using this for one or the other project at the company.
SQLite4: The Design Of SQLite4. That sounds very interesting. Especially the first paragraph in "2.0 Overview", where he briefly emphasizes that SQLite3 will continue to be supported and both versions will remain available in parallel. And of course, the various changes that SQLite4 will have compared to the other version, such as the significantly better encapsulation of the engine in its own object. This makes it quite possible to have multiple databases open at the same time without much juggling. And what particularly pleases me: all calculations in Decimal Math and no longer double or float. Sorry, but double (and especially not float) has anything to do in a database, except perhaps as a data type for rare special cases. Also some other nice things in it, for example covering indexes and of course the standard available foreign key constraints.
Jarvis. Someone is working on something like Light Table for Python (Light Table has also promised Python support, but so far there's only a preview for Clojure). Looks quite interesting and finally brings some fresh air into interactive environments for programming languages.
Remote Debugging - Real Software Documentation. Other systems should take a few slices from this. In my game project, I had a problem with the latest version under Linux. However, my development environment is OSX, where everything runs smoothly. So what to do? Well, a good opportunity to take a look at the remote debugger. And it's really trivial. Boot up a Linux system (I use Vagrant on my OSX machine), copy over the remote debugger stub, run it, configure it minimally, and get started. Directly from the OSX IDE, transfer the compiled code to the remote environment and start it, directly with breakpoints and variable watch and such things. Basically, all that I would also have locally with OSX. In principle, there is almost no difference, except that the program runs on Linux. Why is it so much more complicated in so many other environments? I guess I'm getting old, I just don't have the patience for cumbersome environments anymore.
..Nowhere.. has a series of free classes and plugins for RealBasic, including one for a syntax highlighting editor and list boxes with arbitrary cell content.
The Opa blog: Announcing Opa 1.0. Opa no longer generates native code for its own backend, but generates JavaScript for Node.js integration. Sounds quite interesting, as Node.js integration could eventually allow access to the libraries available there (though you would then naturally lose the guaranteed properties of Opa). And additionally, the chances are now higher that you will find a suitable host or that self-hosting could become more pleasant.
Make runfcgi fail when database connection is open before fork. This is something I've been chasing for ages, most recently in a few pretty important projects. Flup works by first initializing the WSGI application and then making the forks for the workers with this initialized WSGI application. Unfortunately, we have database accesses during application initialization - as a result, the base process already has an open database connection, and each fork copies these data. But the socket of the connection doesn't go with it - the new process just thinks it's connected, but it's not. Accesses from the new processes then fail with an exception. In the linked patch, you can also replace the raise on the exception with connection.connection = None. This simply discards the connection that is already defective and always builds a new connection in new processes. With this, we have at least been able to fix this in a production environment (with psycopg2) and are optimistic that it will also help in the environment with pyodbc.
LiveScript. Looks interesting, a descendant of CoffeeScript, but with a syntax that is strongly inspired by Haskell and a Prelude that also aligns with Haskell. With it, you can work in a functional language instead of JavaScript, which, however, continues to try to maintain a balance between functional and imperative elements - so not the pure approach as in Haskell.
ronnix/fabtools. Looks interesting - a few tools for Fabric with which you can manage simple system packages and Python packages (also within virtual environments). Should take a look, could simplify a few things when initializing work environments. However, Vagrant currently only uses Chef and Puppet and not Fabric, if I remember correctly.
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL Transact-SQL. There you can find more information about the isolation level in MSSQL, especially what the snapshot feature means. In principle, this makes MSSQL behave similarly to PostgreSQL.
#18251 multithreading deadlock in django.models.loading.get_apps – Django. And another thing that might affect us - race conditions between Django threads during the initialization of Django applications. There's already a patch for this that fixes it in the Django internals.