Tag Archives: python

Some components for the “other” information infrastructure on the internet (rss feed etc)

Posted on by Thibauld

Disclaimer: this started essentially as note-to-self listing a few interesting projects to spare me another internet search session.

RSS feeds (and their twin brothers Atom) are ubiquitous over the internet making it possible to easily get a summary of the latest publications of a given website.

Interestingly a huge amount of websites produce this kind of feeds (most blogs obviously but also sites like  twitter[en]) and from this point of view the RSS format is quite lively.

But on the consumer side, I’m pretty  disappointed with the “offer” in terms of RSS readers. Over the time I’ve tested several well-known desktop readers (liferea, rssowl, thunderbird…) and most of then ended up synchronizing with Google Reader. This one has consequently come to be my main newsreader and it appears to me as clearly dominating the world of internet based newsreader. However such a predominance is not that much a good sign1.

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  1. a quick glimpse at HackerNews shows that people are regularly trying to reinvent the newsreader service so there is hope I guess [↩]

Yapsy 1.9 release

Posted on by Thibauld

A new version of Yapsy, my fat-free DIY plugin framework,  has just been released ! The project went (again) dormant for a bit more than one year during which a couple of bug reports and features requests eventually waked it up :)

 

More details on the new release are available on sourceforge and so are the downloadable files.

And the first big news is that there is a version compatible with Python3 at last !

Another big news is that this gave me the occasion to search a bit over the internet and realise that there are actually people talking about yapsy here and there.

You find traces of it already on the famous stackoverflow (yes as far as I can tell, and as of 2011/12 they are all mentions of ‘my’ yapsy, very moving indeed :) ), on this quick inventory of Python plugin systems and more anecdotally on pastebin

And for the specific projects that use this library, so far I’ve found:

And of course this adds up with the great people I already had the occasion to thank in my latest post about yapsy.

Let’s face it, this ridiculously small piece of code is h-y-p-e… (ok I may be overdoing it a little but if I don’t do it who will ?)

My code is awesome ! Or at least its users are…

Posted on by Thibauld

I’ve just received a nice e-mail pointing at an even nicer blog post about one of my pet project: Yapsy and the author states it quite clearly: “Yapsy is awesome”!

Many thanks to Roberto Alsina for these kind words and for the very nice tutorial he wrote about yapsy.

To be honest, Yapsy is above all just an absurdly tiny piece of code, and , even with that, still has a long way to go before I dare qualify it as awesome, but one thing is sure the developpers who use it already are undoubtedly the awesome ones !

Yapsy is a project I started 3 years ago on my free time, and put on SourceForge “just in case” it could be helpful… It went dormant several times but was waken up by requests and suggestions sent by developpers like Peppy’s Rob McMullen, MysteryMachine’s Roger Gammans and now Aranduka’s Roberto Alsina who all deserve a big thank you.

In its latest release (5 days ago) I corrected some bugs and tried to make the documentation as useful as possible. All in all, I wanted to highlight the ways in wich yapsy could be used to simplify the development of a plugin manager, but Roberto beat me to this. I’m especially proud of two of his comments:

  • “One of the great things about Yapsy is that it doesn’t specify too much.”
  • “it helps you write better code.”

The first one was clearly indented but also known to be hard to get right (and IMHO yapsy’s not quite there yet).

The second is way beyond yapsy’s initial scope, but it’s really sweet to read, especially from somebody who — as it seems — has already tasted Qt development1

More info about Yapsy at ohloh

  1. Qt is well known among GUI toolkits for helping you write better code so that compliments from Qt developpers are worth twice as much :) [↩]

Correlation does not imply causation

Posted on by Thibauld

I’m trying something new today: a small experiment falling in between programming and scientific litterature.

I’ve been interested in “literate programming” for quite some time now, without going any further though. But I recently found the tools that would make it actually practicable and decided to dive in.

So, I’ve implemented a very small Python module that illustrates the notion of autocovariance and autocorrelation and the way to compute them via Fourier transforms:

Literate Musing > Autocorrelations

The subject is not new at all, but such measures are something that I had to re-implement (for image processing puproses) more than I’d like to in past years, and each possible implementation having its own statistical biases, it always takes time to remember all the tricky details. So, this new document should at least help (me) quickly find all the relevant info.

This was also a subject underpinning a big part of my PhD work… a PhD that I defended 2 years ago, is there some “causation” here ?

:)

For the technical side of things, the “tools” that helped me setup this “experiment” are essentially:

BackupMonitor: important bugfix

Posted on by Thibauld

Icône de Backup Monitor

A nasty bug found its way in the latest release of BackupMonitor which caused the program to suddenly exit when something went wrong during the execution of one of the backup script.

The bug has been corrected  (a problem with threads and a method call that should have been asynchronous) and the “correct” behaviour is back: when something goes wrong an error log is displayed and the program “hiberantes” until the user wakes it up.

The updated version can be downloaded from the project’s page.