import this

10. January, 2014

During the Flask presentation yesterday, I learned about an Easter egg in Python: “import this” which will print:

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

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Posted by digulla

Comfortable Access to Config Options in Python

12. October, 2012

I always felt that Python’s ConfigParser API could be better. I like to access my config options like this:

    self.config.option

To solve this, I wrote ConfigProvider which can copy options from ConfigParser into a Python instance:

class ConfigProvider:
    __doc__ = 'Interface which can copy values from ConfigParser into a config object'
    
    def __init__(self, cfg):
        self.cfg = cfg
    
    def update(self, section, cfg):
        __doc__ = 'Updates values in cfg with values from ConfigParser'
        
        for name, value in inspect.getmembers(cfg):
            if name[0:2] == '__' or inspect.ismethod(value):
                continue
            
            #print name
            if self.cfg.has_option(section, name):
                setattr(cfg, name, self.cfg.get(section, name))

The magic happens in update() which examines the config object that you pass in and which copies the values from the external ConfigParser into it.

The gist “Comfortable config access with Python” contains the whole code and a demo.

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Posted by digulla

Boo

8. July, 2011

It seems a dream of mine has come true: A language like Python, compiled into something that can be executed as fast as Java or C++ and which allows to extend the compiler at compile time.

Ladies and gentlemen, please a warm welcome for Boo.

Guess I’ve found a reason to install Mono.

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Posted by digulla

Maven Tools for Eclipse: M2 Repository Analysis And Dependency Management

13. May, 2011

I’ve finished RC1 of my set of tools to import Eclipse plug-ins into Maven 2 repositories. You can find the source on github. It needs Python 2.7 and lxml. pip is your friend.

The new features: There is now a tool to analyze the M2 repository for oddities. Currently, it can find these issues:

  • Dependencies which are used but not part of the repository
  • Dependencies which are used with different versions or version ranges (i.e. when one POM includes a dependency with 1.0 and another POM pulls in the very same dependency with version 1.1)
  • Dependencies which are used without versions or version ranges or a catch-all version like [0,)
  • Several versions of the same artifact in the repository

Plus it prints a list of all POMs in the repo with files (jar, pom, sources, test-sources, …). Here is a sample report.

The last tool can create a POM file with a dependencyManagement element containing the versions of the POMs in the repository. You can use this to nail down all versions to the ones existing in your repository (so you don’t accidentally pull in something you don’t want).

Lastly, I’ve enhanced the patch tool. Instead of overwriting replaced dependencies, it will now move them into a new profile. This way, users of the repository can specify which dependency they want (the one from the repository or, say, one from Maven Central).

I will try to build a new testing repo over the weekend so we can start wrapping up the necessary patches for a release.

Related posts: Eclipse 3.6.2 Artifacts for Maven 2

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Posted by digulla

Numpty Physics

17. March, 2011

I really liked Crayon Physics. It was simple idea, great brain teaser, the perfect UI.

If you liked it as well, have a look at Numpty Physics.

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Posted by digulla

pygments syntax highlighting

4. January, 2011

Need a good syntax highlighter? Check out Pygments.

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Posted by digulla

The Python Module of the Week Blog

17. March, 2010

If you love Python, this blog is for you: Doug Hellmann posts about one Python module every week (PyMOTW). The posts contain lots of real world examples how to use a module. This week, it’s ElementTree.

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Posted by digulla

PyScan 0.6

10. October, 2009

I’ve done some more work on PyScan. Most work is under the hood but I’ve got a system to load and save projects and a bug was fixed: If you pressed the Scan button too quickly with 0.4, the last image could have been overwritten. PyScan is now based on hplip 3.9.8.

PyScan 0.6.tar.gz (16KB, MD5 Sum: 2b5e23099be438ceceb69ec23d64cec6)

See the original post for features and the system requirements.

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Posted by digulla

Attaching Sources To Eclipse Artifacts

8. October, 2009

After running mvn eclipse:make-artifacts -DstripQualifier=true -DeclipseDir=...path/to/eclipse, you might have lots of source JARs but they aren’t in the right place for Maven 2 to pick them up.

This little Python script fixes that. Just run it after eclipse:make-artifacts.

Note: You may be wondering why I use eclipse:make-artifacts instead of the recommended eclipse:to-maven. Simple: I don’t like to have a dozen core-*.jar in my project.

"""Maven 2 Eclipse Artifact Source resolver

After importing Eclipse artifacts into an M2 repository with

> mvn eclipse:make-artifacts -DstripQualifier=true -DeclipseDir=.../eclipse

run this script to move all source JARs in the right place for
Maven 2 to pick them up.
"""
import os, sys
from shutil import copyfile

def processGroup(path):
    print 'group %s' % path
    for dir in os.listdir(path):
        path2 = os.path.join(path, dir)
        if '.' in dir:
            processArtifact(path2)
        else:
            processGroup(path2)

def processArtifact(path):
    srcPath = path + '.source'
    #print 'processArtifact',srcPath
    if os.path.exists(srcPath):
        processArtifactWithSource(path)

def processArtifactWithSource(basePath):
    binPath = basePath
    srcPath = basePath + '.source'
    baseName = os.path.basename(basePath)
    print 'artifact', baseName
    
    for version in os.listdir(binPath):
        vbinPath = os.path.join(binPath, version)
        vsrcPath = os.path.join(srcPath, version)
        
        srcJar = os.path.join(vsrcPath, '%s.source-%s.jar' % (baseName, version))
        destJar = os.path.join(vbinPath, '%s-%s-sources.jar' % (baseName, version))
        
        if os.path.exists(srcJar):
            print '%s -> %s' % (srcJar, destJar)
            copyfile(srcJar, destJar)

m2repo = os.environ['M2_REPO']
if not m2repo:
    raise Exception('Env variable M2_REPO is not set')

root = os.path.join(m2repo, 'org', 'eclipse')
for dir in os.listdir(root):
    path = os.path.join(root, dir)
    processGroup(path)

Updated 01. December 2009: The script now figures out where your M2 repo is. Plus a minimum of documentation.

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Posted by digulla

Printing Big Stuff On Linux

22. June, 2009

During the weekend, I tried to print my family tree. It was pretty simple to generate with GenealogyJ but frankly, the family tree view sucks. I was constantly shifting my “root” node to be able to see the parts I was interested in, etc. And printing this sucks even more. GJ will use lots of paper, printing huge empty boxes with lots of space around them. If I reduced the size of the parts which I don’t need, the layout fell apart. In short, I needed something better.

Graphviz to the rescue. A small Python program (100 lines) read the GED file and turned it into a graph with the layout of the persons just the way I wanted them to be. dot thought about the graph for a few seconds until it emitted a nice SVG which I could then print. Or so I thought.

I opened Inkscape and clicked on print. Yeah … that looks like the document … or rather a small part of it. Where is the poster print option? Ah, there is none. Great. Export as PNG with … oh … 150 DPI. Starting GIMP. No poster printing either. lpr tries to scale the image by .114537 which results in a 87 MB file. You gotta be kidding! kprinter? Nope … unless the command poster can be found.

A word of warning: The poster for openSUSE 11.1 (which you get with zypper) is broken. I tried it with both PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript and both resulting files were unusable in GhostView, GhostScript and Okular. Use this one instead.

After installing psutils, I could rotate the file to fit better on the page, too.

Conclusion: Most programs on Linux create PostScript files but printing them is still something for the command line. The recent print dialogs all look somewhat similar (but are different in tiny, annoying ways), each version is missing some important detail and most of them fail to simply print an oversized image on a single piece of paper or spread it over several. That Inkscape spits out an empty page after the document is just a minor issue.

What’s worse: The print preview either doesn’t work or doesn’t exist, printing to file is not implemented either or isn’t persistent. In the whole process, I ruined roughly 50 sheets of paper. *sigh*

In the end, I had a process which involved six different programs (GenealogyJ, Python, graphviz, Inkscape, pstops, poster) just for this standard task. Printing on Linux has some way to go, yet. On the positive side, I could script all these tasks and I could do it.

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Posted by digulla

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