Lonely Lion

I’ve been working my way through the Plone book. I jumped straight to the Products chapter, and realized I need to slow down and start at the beginning. I have three portals up, two inside my work intranet, and one on cotton.lonelylion.com, http://zope.wirelion.com/test_portal.

The test_portal is where I’ll do the majority of my experimenting.

I’ve been creating a lot of reports at my new job, using ReportLab and pyntkit [1]. It’s been great to a) be so productive, and b) use so much Python.

It seems like there’s a lot of potential task “sweet spots” here that could use some sort of content management / workflow tool. This all coincides very well with a recent Slashdot review on two new Plone books, which led me to the online Plone Book. I’ve gone back and forth with Zope, and have usually thrown up my hands in frustration. There’s a fair number of entries in this blog about these two frameworks, and all the re-designs I’d planned to do using them. Each and every one was ultimately backed out in favor of a more mundane, but easier to understand LAMP architecture.

A few months ago I picked up Webware, and have been very happy with it. It’s great for a lot of the programming I want to do, but doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that Plone does. Which is another reason I like it. With Plone, the sheer number of bells and whistles gets kind of confusing if all you want to do is make a simple application. Plone also requires you to pretty much give your site over to it. I’m not sure it’s realistic to have a portion of your site be straight static stuff, and the rest be Plone. It’s much more of a complete solution.

The worst part about the b&w (bells and whistles) was the terrible documentation. I’m a relatively bright guy, I enjoy new things, but the learning curve on Plone / Zope was atrocious, largely because there just weren’t any good books on the market that could explain the system to me in a way that made sense to me. They all seemed to gloss over big chunks of important stuff.

And yet, despite my frustration, Zope and Plone have continued to grow. The Plone sites page is tremendously impressive. So, after checking out this new (June 2004) Plone book, I’m starting to believe that I can actually make some useful stuff for work with Plone. We’ll see.

[1] – Dave and I are really close to releasing an actual “release” on pyntkit. I’m working on documentation. As you can see, I’m the kind of person that hates poorly documented tools.

I’ve recently declared myself the world’s greates Pecan Pie baker. Here’s the secret, the Karo syrup recipe from the back of the bottle. I am of the belief that the recipes on the back of the packages are generally the best. Take for instance, this ingredient list from an online recipe:

    * 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
    * 1/2 teaspoon salt
    * 2 tablespoons white sugar
    * 1/2 cup butter, chilled
    * 4 tablespoons ice water
    * 3 eggs, beaten
    * 3/4 cup light corn syrup
    * 2 tablespoons dark corn syrup
    * 3/4 cup light brown sugar
    * 3 tablespoons butter, melted
    * 1 pinch salt
    * 1/2 cup pecans, finely crushed
    * 1 cup pecans, quartered
    * 1 cup pecan halves

That’s too much. Salt? What for? The fewer ingredients, the better. Rule of thumb number 2, less ingredients are better.

An article I wrote for Linux Journal is coming out soon. It’s in the January 2005 issue, which is pictured on the Linux Journal website. I used Linux (and Python) to feed my cats over the web. I’m pretty excited for the article, it was a lot of work. It’s cool to see it in print.

Dave Rock, a fellow chiPy member and backup administrator, and I have been working on a Netbackup Python toolkit for the past few weeks. Dave wrote a great Python bpdbjobs parser that’s recieved a lot of praise on the NBU mailing list. We talked about making his script into a toolkit, and pyntkit was born.

I checked in the first CVS version of the toolkit yesterday afternoon. In the mean time, I built a simple report using the toolkit:

from pyntkit.pyntkit import Jobs
""" Create Jobs object, and load it """
j = Jobs()
j.loadJobs(open('data.txt','r'))
numJobs = 0
jobsFailed = 0
jobsSuccess = 0
kbBackedUp = 0
for id in j.keys():
    numJobs += 1
    if j[id].kbytes:
        kbBackedUp += int(j[id].kbytes)
    if j[id].status == '0' or j[id].status == '1':
        jobsSuccess += 1
    else: jobsFailed += 1

Although the toolkit isn’t ready for a NBU list announcement, or a official “release” bundle, it’s already useful to me at work. It will be interesting to see if other people find it useful, once we can shape things up for a release. In the meantime, if you’re a Netbackup admin that likes Python, feel free to check out the module from CVS. If you have comments, we’re very interested in hearing your feedback.

Last night’s chiPy meeting went very well. The presentations were great, and the discussions they spawned were very interesting. We may have hit a record with the number of people attending, as the room seemed pretty full. brian d foy attended, and wrote about us in his weblog.

As brian pointed out in his post, some discussion was had about “why doesn’t Python have a CPAN?” It’s something that seems to come up fairly frequently. The answer is usually, “because someone hasn’t made it.” This morning, Brian Ray wrote to the list suggesting that chiPy take on a CPAN like project. It sounds good, especially considering the talent level of the folks that consistently attend meetings.

Update: There have been some good responses to Brian’s initial post to the list.

So much for secrets, my presentation on doctest at chiPy. It’s super short. Probably because the actual meat of doctest is super short. Which, in my humble opinion, is what makes it the best way to write realistic, usable tests for your code.

NOAA – National Weather Service – National Digital Forecast Database XML/SOAP Service

As reported on Wired & Slashdot, the NOAA is now releasing their raw weather data in XML / SOAP formats. This is really pretty exciting. Now the question becomes, what to do with it first.