By anders pearson 17 Jun 2005
first, there were cockroaches controlling robots, now there are robots controlling mice.
<p>clearly, the next evolutionary step will be cockroaches controlling mice. </p>
<p>ladies and gentlemen, the human race’s days are numbered. prepare to welcome your new cockroach controlled rodent overlords.</p> By anders pearson 18 Apr 2005
i use SQLObject for all my programming that involves a database. i think it hits a real sweet spot on the simplicity/power curve.
using it basically involves creating some classes that inherit from SQLObject for each table in the database and giving them each attributes that correspond to the columns of the tables. it doesn’t really let you forget that you’re using a database to store your stuff, but it saves you from having to hand code all the simple SELECT and UPDATE type SQL queries. i really like this approach; it’s more of a representation of database tables and rows as objects than an attempt to force fit objects into a relational database.
it’s got a powerful enough query syntax to cover about 95% of anyone’s needs. for four of the remaining five percent, the ability to pass in raw SQL for the WHERE clause covers you. so you can do LEFT OUTER JOINs to your heart’s content when you really need to.
what it’s missing out of the box though, is the ability to specify which columns get fetched. since it returns a list of objects instead of raw results, it will always fetch the columns it needs to build those objects. 99% of the time that’s fine. but it prevents you from using a lot of SQL’s built in functions like COUNT(), MAX(), or AVG(), which are useful for various reporting type queries and for doing really complex queries with GROUP BY and HAVING constructs.
but all hope is not lost!
i had to dig around in the source code a bit to figure out exactly how to do it, but it’s actually pretty easy to directly access SQLObject’s internal database connection methods and make raw queries directly. it just looks like:
:::python
# Node is a class that inherited from SQLObject
results = Node._connection.queryAll(
"""SELECT [some really complex and nasty SQL
that needs aggregate functions, etc.]""")
# results will then be a list of tuples,
# one tuple per row returned.
there’s also a queryOne() method that just returns one tuple if that’s all you want.
the only thing you don’t want to do is use that stuff for updates, inserts, or deletes since it bypasses SQLObject’s caching and you could end up with weird inconsistencies between what’s in the database and what’s in memory. use SQObject’s regular interface for anything that modifies the database.
anyway, this post is here so google will find it and other people wanting to do raw queries won’t have to dig through the source code (although it’s pretty easy to understand if you’re so inclined).
By anders pearson 14 Apr 2005
i’ve been kind of busy in the world of plone lately.
one project that i contributed to is out now: Wicked, “wiki with no wiki aftertaste”. it’s pretty cool but might not make much sense to you unless you’re already immersed in plone development.
another one that my coworker, Jonah, and i are building is PloneStickies. it’s not really release ready yet, but should be soon. it basically implements “sticky notes” (“post-its” is trademarked) for plone. Jonah’s doing most of the actual plone part and i’ve been concentrating on the frontend javascript and CSS part. as a taste of what’s to come, here’s my stickies test page which has the latest version of the frontend stuff which will hopefully make it into the upcoming PloneStickies release.
i’m rather proud of that bit of code. it’s fast, robust, full-featured, fairly clean and it even works in IE i’m told. i’m trying to keep it general enough that at least parts of it will be useful outside Plone.
By anders pearson 14 Apr 2005
Bruce Schneier has an interesting write-up on the security procedures of the papal elections.
they’re quite elaborate and, as he points out, quite secure. over the last thousand years, they’ve done a pretty good job of preventing just about any kind of voter fraud that could be imagined.
what really gets me about the whole thing is that with all of this obvious thought having been put into ensuring fairness and transparency, it’s clear that the cardinals don’t trust each other very far (or at least historically haven’t). all of those cardinals are supposed to be holy, moral, ethical men, but if there had never been problems, no one would have bothered coming up with and codifying all these elaborate safeguards. so clearly at least a few bad apples have made it through. yet, once one of them is elected pope, he is elevated to the holiest office in the world and is considered to speak directly for god.
it reminds me of Bill Hicks’ observation on the popemobile and its inch thick bulletproof plexiglass: “that’s faith in action, folks.”
By anders pearson 12 Apr 2005
please figure out how to get the intercoms on the subway trains working reliably before you put the trains on autopilot.
it would make us all feel just a little bit more confident.
sincerely, NYC residents
By anders pearson 11 Apr 2005
i’ve been using mpd as my music player lately. it’s a neat little program; very minimalist but it does a good job with my music library and is a lot less flakey than yammi has been lately.
mpd doesn’t really keep track of the songs you’ve played though. i really like archiving that kind of data for some reason. i have to keep my packrat tendencies under control when it comes to physical stuff since my apartment would fill up, but with data, i figure disk space is cheap. so if there’s any chance i might someday find it useful, i try to figure out how to put it in a database.
so, a couple lines of python later, i had a little script that would detect song changes and fire off an http request with the info.
with the help of subway and a few more lines of python, i had a nice web interface to the database of what songs i’d listened to when. it’s open to the public too; the curious can check out the last 50 songs i’ve listened to updated in real time.
By anders pearson 07 Apr 2005
i recently installed trac on my work machine to manage my little personal coding projects like the engine behind this site.
trac is a pretty sweet combination of a subversion repository, a wiki, and a bug database. i’m quite impressed with it so far. it was a little painful to get it setup and configured, but it’s been nice to me since.
it’s up here if you’re curious. if you encounter bugs with this site or have suggestions for new features, the best thing to do is to add a ticket through trac.
By anders pearson 04 Apr 2005
posting this from my new laptop, a nice refurbished thinkpad T23 that i picked up for $500 (1.1GHz, i spent some extra cash to upgrade it to 1GB of RAM, 30GBdrive, 14” XGA screen, 5.3lbs, and a PCMCIA wireless card that i picked up for $12.99. not the sexiest laptop out there, but for the price, i’m quite pleased with it.)
i’d been hearing a lot about the Ubuntu linux distribution lately. at the plone sprint i went to in january, there were a bunch of happy ubuntu users and people have been raving about how well optimized it is for laptops, so i burned an ubuntu install CD and put it on the laptop when it arrived today.
i’ve been a pretty happy gentoo user for a while now and i love its package manager, portage, more than toast. for a seasoned linux user who wants to keep on the bleeding edge and tweak the hell out of their system, gentoo is hard to beat. but today, i just wanted to play with my new toy as soon as possible and make sure everything worked properly and gentoo takes a long time to install.
ubuntu seems to have been a good choice. it took about 15 minutes in all to get it up and running with a nice Gnome desktop and all the hardware working and configured properly. ubuntu aims to be “linux for humans” and the founder, Mark Shuttleworth (remember the billionaire who bought his way onto a russian space launch?), has some strong opinions about how software should Just Work. well, ubuntu pretty much does. the install process pretty much consisted of booting off the CD, hitting enter a few times to select the defaults, entering a username and password and then rebooting. when it was done copying stuff off the CD and installing itself, everything pretty much just worked. the wireless networking was turned off by default but all i had to do was turn it back on; i didn’t have to configure it at all.
i’m quite impressed that after installing linux on this machine, i actually have no idea what models the videocard or soundcard are. it just autodetected them and they work. granted, thinkpads have a reputation for being extremely well supported by linux distributions, but it’s still a fairly novel experience for me. knoppix usually does a good job with the hardware detection too, but installing from knoppix is clumsy at best and the user experience lacks a lot of polish. ubuntu seems well integrated and planned. the install process doesn’t include any package selection step; it just comes with a base set defaulting to a nicely customized Gnome desktop. once it’s installed, it’s basically a standard Debian system so apt-get will pull down anything else you need.
i’m going to see how long i can live with ubuntu on here before the tweaking urges take over and i install gentoo on it. it probably depends on whether it becomes my main machine at home. if it does, i’ll probably want to do things that apt-get doesn’t let me sooner rather than later and that will be the end of ubuntu. but if it mostly becomes a travel machine that i only pull out every once in a while and want everything to work perfectly without having to think about, i think ubuntu will probably work out.
at any rate, unless i encounter anything really heinous in the next couple days of playing, i think i have a new distro to recommend to people who are looking to try out linux. the install process was almost identical to OS X’s (except that it runs in console mode and doesn’t really look very pretty; but the number of steps and the choices you’re presented with are about the same) and the polish of the resulting system is pretty close to what Apple gives you (and catching up quickly). so i would also recommend ubuntu to Mac fans who have some spare x86 hardware and want to run something nicer than windows on it.
By anders pearson 02 Apr 2005
some background for those who either don’t know jesse andersson or don’t know what he’s been up to lately:
jesse is an old high school friend of many of us. he has a strange and wonderful mind. for the last couple years, he’s been working as a trucker. driving back and forth across the country by himself with no one to talk to. lately, he’s taken to using his free nights and weekend minutes and leaving long messages on Venice’s voicemail just rambling on about whatever’s on his mind while he drives. she played some for me that she’d saved and they’re hilarious. i decided that i would be doing the world a disservice if i didn’t figure out some way to share.
luckily this whole “podcasting” thing’s been sweeping the blogging world lately and, while i’ve never had much interest in it, i realized that it’s ideal for jesse. so we took the liberty of creating a blogspot blog and an audioblog.com account for jesse and gave him the info. they have a feature where you can just call a number and leave a message and it turns it into an mp3 and posts it to a blog for you. so now he can post from the road with his cellphone and the whole world can share the amusement.
the site we setup is http://truckertroll.blogspot.com/
(he has a “troll” character and voice that he’s been working on. apparently it’s part of some scheme of eventually recording an audiobook or something. you’ll need to know that to make any sense of the first post and why he’s speaking with a british accent.)
By anders pearson 01 Apr 2005
i did this about a year ago but forgot to really mention it to anyone. now, there seems to be a renewed interest in all things javascript/dhtml, so maybe someone will find it useful. it’s basically just a little javascript hack that makes it so users can dynamically resize a textarea on a page. it works in every modern browser i’ve tried it in and degrades gracefully to a plain old textarea in any browser that doesn’t support it or has javascript disabled.
i’m trying to make a point of sharing more of these little tricks with the world.
the script uses a drag and drop implementation from elsewhere. i’m not crazy about it, but i wasn’t about to write my own. at some point though, i’d like to remove the little bit of javascript in the page that it requires to make it more in line with the idea of unobtrusive javascript. that will probably require modifying the drag + drop library though, or implementing the parts of it that i need on my own.
i’m also really interested in taking this technique and turning it into a greasemonkey script so i can resize the textareas on any page on the web.