Everyone else seems to be doing these big end-of-year posts, summarizing their years, their learning, achievements, setbacks, joys, and sorrows. I’m not sure when it happened, but I’ve largely lost the patience to go on and on about my life (I guess Twitter kind of takes care of that for me any more), so I’ll keep this short (if not sweet).

2008 was a year. We had a miserable few months of illness and sleeplessness, followed by a good long stretch of absolute, utter joy with our daughter, Claire. I read less than I like to, but greatly enjoyed what I did. I wrote far less code for myself than I like to, but I was able to instigate a quantum leap in the level of Javascript written at work, as well as contributing a number of fixes back to the Dojo framework. I played an awful, awful lot of Rock Band. I enjoyed PyCon and Velocity, in spite of their flaws, and I wish that work and family allowed me more time to contribute to the community. I continued to grow as a photographer, though I was frustrated by several months of inaction and lack of inspiration from which I’m still trying to play catch-up. And in these rocky economic times, I’m happy to remain in my position at American Greetings.

I’m overwhelmingly proud of my wife’s accomplishments, both academic and parental. I’m ridiculously happy to be my daughter’s father–the role of Daddy suits me just fine; she amazes me daily and has truly transformed my emotional well-being.

I am immensely grateful for my friends, for my family, and my good fortune. I hope for a better, more peaceful future in 2009, that we may all heal the hurts of these mad days and enjoy the fruits of the life we’re given.

To all who may read this, here’s a quick little toast to the passing of the old year and the dawning of the new. Cheers!

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os,sys
C=os.chdir
S=os.system
M=os.mkdir
J=os.path.join
A=os.path.abspath
D=os.path.dirname
E=os.path.exists
W=sys.stdout.write
V=sys.argv
X=sys.exit
ERR=lambda m:W(m+"\n")
PRNT=lambda m:W(m+"\n")
assert len(V)==2,"you must provide a sandbox name"
SB=V[1]
H=A(D(__file__))
SBD=J(D(H),SB)
C(SBD)
PST=J(SBD,'bin/paster')
VAR=J(SBD,'var')
ETC=J(SBD,'etc')
S("mkdir -p "+VAR)
PRNT("restarting "+SB)
CMD=";".join(['source %s'%J(SBD,'bin/activate'),PST+" serve --daemon --pid-file=%s/sandbox.pid --log-file=%s/sandbox.log %s/sandbox.ini start"%(VAR,VAR,ETC)])
PRNT(CMD)
S(CMD)
PRNT("All done!")
X(0)

Weep for us.

It makes me pretty happy so far, except that somewhere in Pipes land I seem to be losing newlines in pre elements (which appears to be a bug in Pipes itself, argh), which is a little (very) annoying when trying to read people’s code samples. I may end up replacing the Pipes side with a little bit of Python (a little Feedparser and PyRSS2Gen ought to do the trick) if I get the time later today.

Anyway. I figured I should share it, on the offchance it makes anyone else’s life better. (Or if such a creature already exists, let me know and I’ll gladly use that instead.)

I have a number of programming itches that I’d like to scratch that are just slightly large enough that I’d really love to just use something that already exists (if available). I’d spend a while digging around, but, well… I’m lazy, and I’m busy. So hopefully some of you have suggestions. I am looking for:

• an MSN Messenger client library (preferably in Python)
• a Twitter client library (preferably in Python)
• a solution for cross-posting between LiveJournal and Wordpress (either direction) that supports (or could be made to support with a minimum of pain) multiple LJ blogs on one end and multiple WP users on a shared blog (not that my wife really posts that much any more) on the other
• a hosting provider that’s friendly to IM bots and is affordable (for some value of “affordable” that I have yet to precisely define, but which in all likelihood simply means that it won’t cause marital unrest)

I may award bonus points if the MSN and Twitter suggestions are both written against Twisted. I know Twisted’s got some MSN support, but I’ve not looked into it too closely and was a little disappointed by the state of the official docs and examples.

I currently host with WebFaction and though I’m normally entirely satisfied with them, I seem to recall that at one point they frowned on running IM bots on their shared hosting platforms, although I can’t immediately find anything expressly prohibiting it in their terms of service, AUP, knowledgebase, and support forums.

Thanks in advance!

So what’s a frazzled dad to do?

Well, I do have Python, and I seem to have Google Reader open an awful lot, and cron jobs are a lot better at remembering to do things than I am… So here’s my fifteen-minute solution that I whipped up the other week in between putting Claire down for her morning nap and getting ready for work. (File names and URLs have been changed to protect the innocent.)

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import datetime
from dateutil.rrule import rrule, DAILY, WEEKLY, MONTHLY
import PyRSS2Gen as RSS2
 
# You'll want to change all of these values, obviously...
KID_NAME = u'Claire'
BIRTHDAY = datetime.datetime(2007, 9, 10, 21, 57)
FEED_URL = 'http://yoursite/kids_age.xml'
FILENAME = 'your_path/kids_age.xml'
 
def periods_between(freq, start_date, end_date):
    rr = rrule(freq, dtstart=start_date)
    periods = len(rr.between(start_date, end_date))
    return periods
 
def format_entry_body(months, weeks, days):
    body = """<h1>Today, %(kid_name)s Is...</h1>
    <ul>
        <li>%(months)s months</li>
        <li>%(weeks)s weeks</li>
        <li>%(days)s days</li>;
    </ul>
    <p>They grow up so fast!</p>"""
    kid_name = KID_NAME    # so we can cheat with locals()
    return body % locals()
 
def make_rss(body):
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    # Add a hash component to the item link so that the RSS reader
    # will recognize this as today's new entry...
    item_url = FEED_URL+'#'+now.strftime('%Y%m%d')
    rss = RSS2.RSS2(
        title=u"How Old Is %s?" % KID_NAME,
        link=FEED_URL,
        description=u"How old is %s in months, weeks, and days" \
            % KID_NAME,
        lastBuildDate=now,
 
        items = [
            RSS2.RSSItem(
                title=u"How old is %s today?" % KID_NAME,
                link=item_url,
                description=body,
                guid=RSS2.Guid(item_url),
                pubDate=now,
            )
        ]
    )
    return rss
 
def to_xml(rss):
    xml = rss.to_xml()
    # Make our xml at least a tiny bit human-readable
    xml = xml.replace('><', '>\n<')
    return xml
 
def main():
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    months = periods_between(MONTHLY, BIRTHDAY, now)
    weeks = periods_between(WEEKLY, BIRTHDAY, now)
    days = periods_between(DAILY, BIRTHDAY, now)
    body = format_entry_body(months, weeks, days)
    rss = make_rss(body)
    xml = to_xml(rss)
    f = open(FILENAME, 'w')
    f.write(xml)
    f.close()
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

You will, of course, have to install dateutil (via easy_install) and PyRSS2Gen (the old-school tarball way) so that they can do the heavy lifting for you.

Then all that’s left is to cron it to run daily, and point your favorite RSS reader at the feed. Voila! You’re on top of exactly how old your kid is, and quickly on your way to becoming Parent of the Year.

• write apps in Python
• deploy on Google’s infrastructure
• access to existing Google goodness like BigTable, email, and authentication
• free account can use up to 500MB of storage and serve ~5M page views/month
• non-free accounts coming soon
• can upload additional modules as long as they fit the sandbox rules

Unfortunately the beta test pool filled up almost immediately, so I don’t get to play with this yet… But it’s definitely exciting that Python’s in such a spotlight lately.

And check out the video of Guido van Rossum talking about App Engine…

Clevelanders who want to help out bringing Python’s premier conference to our fair city should head on over to the bid page on the Python wiki and lend their names and support.

Non-Clevelanders, have no fear! Cleveland’s really quite misunderstood and under-appreciated. We’ve got a great restaurant scene (we’re home to the newest Iron Chef!), tons of attractions (like the Science Center and Rock Hall), world-class museums and other cultural institutions (maybe a few of you have heard of the Cleveland Orchestra, which is rated among the top 3-5 worldwide), the nation’s second largest performing arts center, beautiful parks and lake views, and more–all within walking distance of either the likely conference site or available with a quick jaunt on the rapid transit system. Plus the river hasn’t caught on fire for decades, but you can savor the legacy with really good local beer.

In short, there’s plenty to love about bringing PyCon to Cleveland. Let’s do it!

So I was pretty happy today to see Google announce today that they are making their Google Chart API available for public use. It’s a pretty straightforward, stateless HTTP service: just fire off a properly-formatted GET and receive a PNG image in return. They support line charts, bar charts, pie charts, Venn diagrams, and scatter plots, labels, legends, and a plethora of coloring and styling options. And the output appears fairly pleasing to my eye.

There are a couple of caveats, though…

• You are limited to 50,000 queries per user per day, which may pose some scalability concerns if you plan to build something big on this.
• You have to be careful about the number of data points you submit in your request as you can quickly exceed the allowable URL length, and furthermore you might end up with illegibly smooshed-together data points due to the scale of your output.
• There’s always the “OMG Google will absorb all our data and become sentient, turn evil, and unleash an army of death robots on us all, run for your lives!” paranoia, but that’s really just silly talk.

WIth those hazards in mind, this still seems like it will be very useful for me, at least in the short term. I am of course open to other suggestions and opinions if people would like to share them; if you’ve had good experiences with some charting library that might fit my needs, please let me know!

Asterisk turned up again during open discussion at this Monday’s meeting; while getting caught up, I got the scoop on Asterisk (since I’d missed the talk and been too busy with baby and work to read Nick’s PDF) and we had a good time talking about crazy PBX tricks; the coolest idea was to use Asterisk to hook up your desk phone as a combination lock to trigger a secret door to your underground lair (awesome!).

The meeting proper was a short one due to the sudden absence of one of our speakers; Monday’s lone presenter was Gary Bernhardt, who put three great packages together–httplib2, Beautiful Soup, and Feedparser–for a discussion of “Talking to the Web with Python.” In a particularly interesting example, Gary showed us how to combine Beautiful Soup with Feedparser to build a Technorati-ish blog link extractor in eight lines of code. Note that combining these in a nice, sparse nested loop structure (or even in a super-l33t list comprehension) is a fabulous way to peg your CPU (you have been warned).

Our next meeting will be November 5–if chance finds you in the greater Cleveland area, drop on by!