The following notes are from a presentation I gave at the ChiPy this month on PyJnius, a Python library for accessing Java classes.
The specific use case demonstrated here is for interacting with Android devices, including automation of UI actions.
PyJnius is a spinoff of the Kivy project, which provides an open source UI toolkit especially suitable [...]
The Pragmatic Programmer sums up the problem with upfront estimating about as succinctly as possible:
Initially, you may have only a vague idea of how may iterations will be required, or how long they may be. Some methods require you to nail this down as part of the initital plan, but for all but the most trivial of projects this is a mistake. ...
The weaknesses of Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" are readily apparent and well summarized by Evgeny Morozov, and don't need to be recounted here. Suffice it to say the book is comprised largely of improvised riffs on the social impact of information technology that sometimes seem more worthy of Lanier's musician alter ego than of a book subtitled "A Manifesto." There is, however, much here worthy of attention, and I'd like to summarize and respond to a few of the book's central themes.
Piston appears to have emerged as the preferred method for giving your Django applications a RESTful API. While there are any number interesting things you might want to want to do with such an API, this post is about using it to give your Django app an attractive, Ajax-y, Ext JS interface.
Some years ago I became aware of a software project called Chandler, a personal information manager/calendar/email client being developed by something called the Open Source Applications Foundation, which was started by by Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame. It appeared on my radar for two reasons. First, it seemed an unusually ambitious effort to [...]
The following tutorial details the steps I took to internationalize (starting with a Spanish translation) the interface of Plone Translation Hub, a Plone Archetypes-based product.
Contents
Basic Plone i18n with i18ndude
Advanced Plone i18n
Translating workflow states and transitions
Accessing the Plone translation machinery directly
Resources
Basic Plone i18n with i18ndude
First, processing your UML model via ArchGenXML (assuming you have i18ndude installed) [...]
Not so long ago I found myself in the rather embarrassing position of having authored a translation collaboration tool for use by an international user base without having implemented the platform’s (Plone) internationalization (i18n) facilities. That is, I gave the application an English interface and left it at that. Furthermore I began to [...]
Today for a site using Plone Translation Hub I had to programatically update the roles for all users who had logged in since March 9th, given that this group was known to be responsible enough to be worthy of the "Reviewer" role. One of the site managers asked that I simply run a "SQL [...]
Over the last couple of days, I put together some reStructuredText tools for gedit, the lightweight text editor for the Gnome desktop on Linux. They include syntax highlighting, some keyboard shortcuts, and an HTML preview feature that I derived from another developer’s earlier work on Markdown support.
This was made possible by gedit’s excellent plugin [...]
Version 0.2 of my client for the Backpack Web Services API, Gnapsack, was released today, and now has a new home. The two main enhancements are Windows compatibility and ability to handle multiple lists.
I spent a few months at the end of last year working on a Ruby on Rails project. While I constantly found myself longing for Python, I did appreciate the extent to which RoR carried certain best practices–among them an MVC architecture and Test-Driven Development–to an extreme, baking them into the framework.
The following table [...]
Edgewall Software’s Trac seems to have become something of a standard for agile management of software projects both within the Open Source community and within closed organizations, and after having the opportunity to use it on a recent project, I can appreciate why. It’s simple to setup and manage, and its self-described "minimalistic approach [...]
The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which took effect on January 1, 1995, is one of the three "pillars" of the World Trade Organization (WTO), standing alongside trade in goods (already represented by the GATT) and trade in services in supporting the edifice of global commerce. It establishes minimum standards [...]
I’m using AWStats to track usage on a Plone site that’s essentially a portal for collaborative document translation. That means that most users of the site need to login to do anything useful, and I want to see who’s logging in along with the rest of the stats on my site.
For hosting the site, [...]
Like most Web sites, this site shares server space with a number of other domains. When I recently undertook to set up AWStats after years of not knowing anything about what kind of traffic my personal sites were getting, I figured it would probably be relatively easy to make it so that anybody else [...]
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Ever since Adam Smith in the 18th century extolled the prospects for mutual gain inherent in free trade between nations, economics textbooks have tended to classify economic policies as either "welfare-enhancing" or "welfare-reducing." One implication of this tradition is that a macroeconomic policy ought to be judged on the basis of whether it provides [...]
I have just released Gnapsack, a desktop client for Linux that uses the Backpack API. Check out the site for info, screenshots, etc. This is an open source (GPL) project.
While it only runs on Linux currently, I’m hoping to get someone to help me out with a Windows port. It uses the [...]
The following is a rudimentary set of instructions for setting up, on a Linux server, a Darcs repository which uses the most basic possible method for collaboration, in which a single administrator manually applies patches1 sent him/her via email (automatically, via the darcs send command issued by the contributor).2 Some notes on producing those [...]
Over the past year or two I’ve become increasingly convinced that one of the keys to personal productivity is to spend as little time as possible connected to the Internet. For some–for example, those who need to be constantly available via an instant messenging client for collaboration with remotely located coworkers–that may not be [...]
About five months ago, I posed myself a few questions, relating to such matters as currency exchange rates, trade deficits, and public debts, in an effort to enhance my understanding of economics. I currently live in Argentina, a country where periodic financial crises have repeatedly thrown the country into disarray and economic depression. [...]