Older blog entries for knipknap (starting at number 81)

Freech 0.9.14 Is Out!

In what might be the biggest release of this week (so far), I am proud to announce an updated piece of software on which I have been working for a long time. Freech (which was formerly known as Tefinch, and Ammerum before that) is a threaded discussion forum for PHP5/MySQL5.

This new release comes with a shitload of new features:

Freech supports user accounts and groups. It currently provides a fixed number of four groups: Administrators, Moderators, normal users and anonymous users).

The user registration is fully automated, and users need to confirm their email address before activating an account.

A powerful new search feature was added:

There is a completely new administration interface: Administrators may edit users and manage groups, and moderators may lock messages in the forum.
Users may now also create polls:

Several “special pages” were added, such as a list showing the number of postings per user, and a statistics feature.

Freech also has a “sticky” feature, allowing moderators to pin a message to the top of the forum. There are many more features, and generally, Freech is a lot more polished than it used to be. Most of the features are plugins, so all most features can be easily disabled. On top of it all, the performance was also drastically improved, even when all new plugins are enabled.

Demo Forum: http://demo.debain.org/freech/
Download: http://dl.debain.org/freech/freech-0.9.14-1.tar.bz2
Project page: http://code.google.com/p/freech/
Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/freech/

Syndicated 2009-01-08 23:53:36 from Debain.org

Release: pywsgi 0.9.0

pywsgi is a brand new and very simple Python module for web applications. Applications using pywsgi will work with WSGI, CGI, and mod_python; the differences between these environments are abstracted. It also handles sessions, cookies, and GET/POST data. It also comes with some useful tools for URL handling.

Some example code is here:

def handler(request):
    # The code of your actual web site is here.
    request.write('Hello World')
    request.start_session()
    for key, value in request.get_data():
        print "GET DATA:", key, value
    for key, value in request.post_data():
        print "POST DATA:", key, value
    for key, value in request.cookies():
        print "COOKIE:", key, value
    for key, value in request.session().data():
        print "SESSION DATA:", key, value

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from pywsgi import RequestHandler
    request_handler = RequestHandler(handler)

The above code will work with both, mod_wsgi and mod_cgi. Note that accessing GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION data is completely uniform via a dictionary-like Table object.
This initial release also comes with complete API documentation.

Links:
Download
Project page
API documentation
Handbook (PDF, incomplete)

Syndicated 2009-01-08 17:45:12 from Debain.org

Release: SpiffWorkflow 0.3.0

SpiffWorkFlow is a powerful workflow engine based on WorkflowPatterns. This is the first release that is pretty much feature complete and is clearly moving towards a stable API, though some changes may still be made.
New features in this release:

• Support for a number of new control-flow patterns: Milestone, Deferred Choice, Interleaved Parallel Routing, Cancel/Complete Multiple Instance, Cancel Case, Cancel Task, Cancel Region, Explicit termination, Recursion, Persistent Trigger, and all variants of the Join for Multiple Instance patterns.
• Support for new data patterns: Local Task Data, Block Data, Task to Task, Task to Sub-Workflow (De)composition.
• Cleanups and bugfixes, as well as slightly improved documentation - though we are still pretty rough on this one.
• Improved build infrastructure. The package should now be a lot easier to install.

Links:
Download
API documentation (incomplete)
Handbook (PDF) (incomplete)

Syndicated 2009-01-07 17:04:13 from Debain.org

Release: termconnect 0.1.0

The second package for today is yet another initial release: termconnect is a Python module for accessing terminal based protocols such as Telnet and SSH.
Because the telnet module that is shipped with Python is incomplete, poorly implemented, and does not have a generic API, termconnect was written to provide a clean and simple replacement.

The example code is here:

from termconnect.Telnet import Transport
#from termconnect.SSH import Transport

conn = Transport()
conn.connect("127.0.0.1") # The default port is 21
conn.authenticate("myuser", "mypassword")
conn.execute("ls -l")
conn.send("exit\r")
conn.close()

The API for SSH is absolutely identical, so changing the protocol in your code is a matter of changing the import statement - that is the way it ought to be. In addition, there is a Dummy protocol adapter that may be used for testing your code - it is a fake protocol that emulates a device.

The code is already pretty well tested, so I am confident that this initial release is mature enough for production environments.

Links:
Download
Project page
API documentation
Handbook (PDF)

Syndicated 2009-01-06 11:11:47 from Debain.org

Release: SpiffWorkQueue 0.1.0

Here is another initial release: SpiffWorkQueue is an asynchronous, multi-threaded queue. The following example shows how to execute two tasks in parallel. In the example, each task consists of a sequence of two actions:

from SpiffWorkQueue import WorkQueue, Sequence, Action

class MyAction(Action):
    def __init__(self, name):
        Action.__init__(self, name)

    def execute(self, lock, global_context, context):
        print "Hello world"

queue    = WorkQueue()
actions1 = [MyAction("one"),   MyAction("two")]
actions2 = [MyAction("three"), MyAction("four")]
queue.enqueue(Sequence(actions = actions1))
queue.enqueue(Sequence(actions = actions2))

queue.start()
while queue.get_length() > 0:
    pass
queue.shutdown()

Links:
Download
Project page
API documentation
Handbook (PDF)

Syndicated 2009-01-06 10:56:44 from Debain.org

Release: SpiffSignal 0.1.0

SpiffSignal is a simple signal/event mechanism for Python. This is the initial release. Instead of screenshots, look at the following example that prints “hello world”:

from SpiffSignal import Trackable

class WatchMe(Trackable):
    def __init__(self):
        Trackable.__init__(self)

    def do_something(self):
        self.signal_emit('did-something', 'hello world')

def my_callback(arg):
    print arg

foo = WatchMe()
foo.signal_connect('did-something', my_callback)
foo.do_something()

Links:
Download
Project page
API documentation
Handbook (PDF)

Syndicated 2009-01-05 17:49:47 from Debain.org

Release: Gip 1.7.0

I am proud to announce the release of a new version of Gip.

Release 1.7.0 adds several new translations, fixes some potential build problems and also adds a better desktop file. Thanks to Henry-Nicolas Tourneur for improving the build infrastructure to make it easier to use for packagers. Also thanks to all translators, including:

bg: Yavor Doganov
da: Keld Simonsen
de: Samuel Abels
es: Víctor Alonso
eu: Mikel Olasagasti
fi: Jorma Karvonen
fr: Michel Robitaille
ga: Kevin Scannell
id: Andhika Padmawan
ms: Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan
nl: Taco Witte
pl: Michał Trzebiatowski
pt: Gian Jaskulski
rm: Florian Verdet
ru: Peter Astakhov
rw: Steven Michael Murphy
sk: Andrej Kacian
sr: Aleksandar Jelenak
sv: Daniel Nylander
tr: Orhan Veli Esen
vi: Clytie Siddall
zh_CN: Ji ZhengYu
zh_TW: Wei-Lun Chao

The updated release can be downloaded here:
http://dl.debain.org/gip/gip-1.7.0-1.tar.gz

The project page is here:
http://code.google.com/p/gip/

Syndicated 2009-01-05 14:15:52 from Debain.org

Announcing: Week Of Free Software

After almost half a year of silence, I am pleased to make an announce:

Starting on Monday, I will dump large amounts of fresh free software on the public.

This had a long time coming; for about a year now I spent most of my programming time cleaning up, redesigning, and improving my projects, shaping them into higher quality software packages and simplifying everything from user interfaces to APIs to the build procedures. To me this is also an exercise in simplifying the release process. As a first step, I removed all of the project pages from my homepage, instead integrating the content on the project pages on code.google.com. I am hoping that this will save me from some maintenance work in the future.

So what is the plan? I will release at least two software packages every single day, for a week. That means all kinds of software: Some for end users, some for the web, some for Python developers; some are major updates or new releases, some bring higher quality and additional polish.

Syndicated 2009-01-02 22:30:30 from Debain.org

Protobuf Bookmark

Looks cool and useful: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

Syndicated 2008-07-09 20:22:12 from Debain.org

Adding/Installing a .desktop File In Anjuta Projects

With help from yura_dev in #anjuta I just figured out how to add a .desktop file to your project in Anjuta:

• Create the desktop file, name it test.in.in and place it in your project root.
• Edit Makefile.am and add the following lines:

desktopdir = ${prefix}/share/applications
desktop_in_file = test.desktop.in
desktop_DATA = $(desktop_in_file:.desktop.in=.desktop)
@INTLTOOL_DESKTOP_RULE@

EXTRA_DIST = $(testdoc_DATA) \
test.desktop.in.in

%.desktop.in: %.desktop.in.in
sed -e 's,[@]PACKAGE_PIXMAPS_DIR[@],@datadir@,g’ $< > $@

• Edit the line that says “sed -e …” according to whichever variables you want to replace in your desktop.in.in file.
• Make sure that the replacement variables are defined in your project. You can do this under Project -> Properties -> Variables.

If this does not work then I will probably not be able to help you. I do hope Autotools finally die a quick yet painful death.

Syndicated 2008-06-08 19:22:17 from Debain.org