Morethanseven

One of the projects that came out of the Django Dash recently was PyPants which I’m finding very cool.

It’s basically a quality tracking service for Python modules. For instance my recent UrlTest module has a page on PyPants, scoring a good B grade after some cleanup work earlier today.

Under the hood I think it’s probably CheeseCake which is available as a command line application, maybe with a hint of PyLint and pep8.py thrown in. But the nice interface, as well as tracking of scores over time, really add something. GitHub has been credited by ...

I’ve been meaning to add some of my code to the Python Package Index for a while and have finally gotten around to it with Urltest, my simple DSL for testing WSGI apps.

You can now find it at pypi.python.org/pypi/urltest and install it using setuptools with:

easy_install urltest

At the moment I’ve not added any categorisation or detailed description to the setup.py file, I’ll be doing that soon. I wanted to get it working with the absolute minimum setup.py file, which turned out to look like:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from ...

Following on from yesterdays first useful ant task, here’s another commonly used task – restarting a remote service. I’ve used apache in this example, but it could be any service running on your remote machine and it doesn’t have to be the restart command.

In order to do this we’ll use the sshexec target which has a third party library dependency. This is the same third party library needed for the scp task in yesterdays post

You need first to download JSCH and then compile the source using ant. Just run ant dist in the downloaded folder ...

I occasionally get carried away with Apache Ant. For those that haven’t come across it, Ant is a build tool written in Java, using an XML syntax to describe a series of repeatable tasks. In your typical web standards savvy, dynamic language favouring, web developer types that description is probably all they (think they) need to know. It’s Java. It’s XML. It’s only really useful in the context of building software (dull).

But I think Ant is a particularly handy tool to have around for anyone working on even simple websites. A couple of strong use ...

Ruby people really don’t like CSS do they? But Less is actually pretty cool. It’s basically an attempt to bootstrap features, specifically Variables, Mixins, Operations and Nested Rules, into CSS. The best part about this is it uses CSS syntax and a simple one step compiler. I’d be interested to know what the folks at the W3C think about this.

So for instance you can do:

/* LESS */
@brand_color: #4D926F;
#header {
  color: @brand_color;
}
h2 {
  color: @brand_color;
}

and compile it down to:

/* CSS */
#header {
  color: #4D926F;
}
h2 {
  color: #4D926F;
}

Last night was the first Cambridge Geek Night and saw 35 people or so fill a room above a pub to listen to a few short talks and converse with fellow geeks. I had the pleasure of giving the first talk, a short introduction to using message queues for web developers.

I got lots of good questions from interested people and by the sounds of things it had the desired effect – for people unfamiliar with using a message queue to go out and have a play with some of the cool software available to solve your problems.

Overall the night ...

Neil Crosby got me thinking yesterday about which language to learn/play with next by tweeting

so, lovely people of the interwebs. What webly language should I be spending my time learning then? Right now, I’m all about the PHP.

Neil appears to have gone for Python, but more specifically I’m interested in how you decide what to learn next? And improving the likelihood of you seeing it through and being able to add it to you toolbox. Personally I’ve messed around with a wide range of languages but I would say I’m proficient in only ...

I’ve updated my vanity domain at garethrushgrove.com with a bit of information in case anyone might be interested in my services.

The short version is I’m on the lookout for future projects, probably of a freelance or contract basis but if it’s particularly interesting then maybe a full time position. Basically I’m in quite a nice position and able to wander about a bit looking for something cool to do.

If you reading this site then you know what floats my boat. Python, testing, automation, system design, maybe get into Ruby or another language properly ...

I found myself wanted something to make writing high level, functional tests for WSGI application easier and quicker. If I liked the term I’d call it a domain specific language for testing URLs. Basically I found myself writing a lot of tests like:

def test_404_handler(self):  
    response = self.app.get('/does-not-exist', expect_errors=True)        
    self.assertEquals("404 Not Found", response.status)

Testing more than a view URLs like this got boring quickly. What I wanted was a short hand syntax for defining this sort of simple test and then running them all individually. So was born Urltest. It uses the ...

Although still a big fan of Django, but for some problems I’m finding more and more cases where I prefer less code and more freedom. My biggest issue for some types of problems being Django’s assumption that you’ll be using a relational database, or a database at all. Django wasn’t the reason I started using webapp for App Engine stuff, but in doing so I found that webapp often did all that I needed.

So when I small, non appengine project cropped up I started looking at the different options available and played with a few ...

I did a talk at the recent barcamp North East on web development tools. Specifically I wanted to talk about the fact that an awful lot of people just use the basic stack of tools they are familiar with. So Microsoft people will just use C#, MSSQL and ISS and lots of people just use PHP, MySQL and Apache. I’m not saying their is anything wrong with those tools, but if they are all you have in your tool box you’re limited how well designed your software can be.

I’d knocked the presentation together in my hotel ...

Andy Clarke, as only he can, has started something of a slagging match with his proposals for a single, central IE6 stylesheet. My first impression was that this is basically a much better version of the browser defaults.

Between backslapping and shouts of heresy there are a few good comments floating on the post so far (I’d expect more). But most of them seem to assume only two types of website exist:

1. Websites for clients. You know, business to business or business to consumer sorts of things. Online stores, radio station websites, newspapers, company brochures, etc.
2. Personal blogs

Obviously ...

After what seems like longer than a year I’ve finally managed to make it back up to Newcastle. It’s the Thinking Digital conference again this year and so far it’s been a hoot. A mix of practical, inspirational and just odd speakers (and acts) suits me pretty well. Lots of twitter activity too.

The highlights for me so far I think has been Dan Lyons talking about the future of media and print businesses. Basically a somewhat rambling attempt to describe where newspapers and print publications find themselves in this day and age (in trouble) and where ...

So, it was the Bamboo Juice conference last Friday at the rather impressive Eden project in Cornwall. Along with Jeremy, Dom, Paul and Relly I presented to the crowd of mainly local first time web conference goers.

It was a great event, and felt a lot like the first Highland Fling in that it was the first big event in an area that’s actually quite a distance from the bright lights of London (it took 8 hours to get back to Cambridge). The party afterwards, held in one of the biomes at the Eden project itself, was also pretty ...