The pylons web framework offers a nice decorator to return json code from a python dictionnary. In your pylons controller, this is as simple as :

@jsonify

def do_something(self):

mydict = {name:"foo"}

return mydict

The skyline in part of Derbyshire is to be transformed when electricity pylons are taken down and replaced with underground cables…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: los angeles city. The blog is also related to: solar city.

Episode 5 of Flash Forward started at the end of the episode and then flashed backward 39 hours to tell us how we got there (taking a cue from LOST by traversing time in all directions).

The episode opens with FBI agents Mark Benford (Fiennes), Demetri Noh (Cho),  Stanford Weddick (Courtney B. Vance) , and Agent Vreede (Barry Shabaka Henley) in Washington, D.C. getting into their car after exiting a Karoke bar when their car is suddenly rammed and then shot at by a group of Asian men.

39 hours earlier, the guys are in Washington to testify at Senate hearings and hopefully get funding for the Mosaic project. We get a few humorous moments where other people are giving testimony at the hearings suggest aliens or Chinese involvement in the blackout. Mark and his team are now focused on the dead crow event that occurred in 1991 in Somalia. During Mark’s lie detector test, he talks about the two men in masks with flashlights. However, he does not mention he was drinking too.

Mark’s partner, Janis Hawk (Christine Woods) is seen taking a karate class and kicks the stuffing out of the guy she is sparring with. Not to be put off, he asks her out on a date which she rebuffs. As we soon learn, Janis is more interested in her chef classmate Maya (played by Numb3rs star Navi Rawat), in a development the series has been hinting at since the visit to Germany. So Janis is “out-ed” to the viewers but will stay closeted on the show because, “I work for the federal government, and they’re not too big on trusting gays with guns.”

Janis is given a flash drive (no pun intended) with 18 years worth of imagery from southern Somalia. In reviewing the photos, Janis notes an asphalt road and mysterious pylons around 100 feet tall under construction there just before the dead crows event.

 In another development, it seems that Stan is the man. We catch him playing basketball with the President (Peter Coyote). He tells Stan the Senate hearings will be closed. Stan asks him if he’s made his choice for the new Vice President since the old one was killed during the blackout. The President also tells Stan about his flashforward. He is sleeping in bed and a secret service agent walks in, wakes him, and tells him “Mr. President, something happened.”

The President also asks Stan if he would be interested in becoming the Director of Homeland Security. He also informs Stan that his nemesis, Senator Joyce Clemente (Barbara Williams) will be conducting the hearings.

In other developments, Mark’s wife Olivia is talking with Mark’s AA sponsor, Aaron and expresses her concerns about the possibility of Mark drinking again.

Stan has words with Senator Joyce Clemente, who is chairing the hearings. She chastises Stan for “what he did with that woman.” She also is still bitter about his helping the President get elected instead of her. However, she does drop the bombshell by telling us that, in her flashforward, she saw herself as President in 6 months. She is also unhappy with Mark’s explanation of his flashforward and wants to question him at the hearings.

The next day, Mark is on the stand at the hearings and goes over what he knows. He discusses the dead crows, the Los Angeles FBI office being the center of the blackout investigation in the future, and the two masked gunmen who try to kill him. He may have also been on the phone. He refers to the event as “impressionistic flashes of reality.”

The problem is, Mark’s flashforward on covers 30 seconds not the 137 seconds everyone was blacked out for. Plus, most people have vivid memories and his seem hazy and disoriented. Senator Clemente wants to know about the other 107 seconds of Mark’s flashforward. Joyce calls his story voodoo or fraud.

Janis meets her girlfriend, Maya, at an art gallery and Maya starts questioning her on her sexuality. It seems Maya’s flashforward was of her wearing a wedding band. She has also “Mosaic-ed” Janis and found out she is pregnant in six months. Janis gets freaked out by this and leaves.

Stan visits the President at the Oval Office. It seems Stan was the “bag man” for the then presidential candidate and covered up an affair the President had six years ago. Stan made the whole thing go away except his affair also produced a child. Stan shows him a picture of the girl and the boy (Stan visits them in Georgetown) and asks for him to get Senator Clemente off his back and give him the funding. He also tells the President that the girl’s flashforward has her living in Puerto Rico in 6 months. Stan leaves and the President makes a call stating “I have a problem I need you to take care of.”

Oliva is getting the house ready to go to bed when she receives a mysterious text message telling her Mark was drinking in his flashforward.

The guys are at a karaoke bar after the hearing. Demetri and Agent Vreede are getting loose single a few karaoke songs while Stan and Mark have a heated discussion. Mark finally tells Stan he was “loaded” in his flashforward. He tells Stan he has been sober 7 years and has no intentions of having another drink again. Stan feels that he put his career on the line for Mark and now he learns he was impaired.

In a news announcement, we learn that the President has selected Senator Clemente as his choice for Vice President. Stan tells Mark there are trade-offs to getting the funding.

The episode ends with the same attack seen in the opening of the episode. We see the FBI agents having a shootout with the Asian men to a karaoke version of the song “Like a Rolling Stone.” Most interesting is how Demetri shows no fear in standing up and walking toward his attackers while shooting at them.

At the same time, Janis is ambushed by an assailant and shot (in the stomach?). However, she is able to kill him before she falls down. The last scene shows her possibly dying, having visions of her being told at the ultrasound that she is having a little girl. So, if Janis does end up dying, we need to answer the question: Why did she have a flashforward of being pregnant if she is going to be dead in 6 months?

New things we learned this week:

It is now three weeks since the blackout.

“Mosaic-ing” is the new Google.

The license plate of the van leaving the shootout is 7S – 8487 (See photo to the right).

I love how they keep throwing out famous quotes at us. Here was one from this episode as stated by Senator Clemente to Stan.

The construction of the pylons in southern Somalia were completed in April 1991.

I’ve been building this little thing for a while now. That little thing is Forum software.

It does everything you would expect from using PHPBB, Reddit or HackerNews, and more. With 6diagrams you can bookmark that interesting topic without having to go through your piles of links in that bookmark tab. It also, of course, remember your own posting.

To learn more of what it can do, please follow this link.

Why?

Already 3 guys asked me this questions. Why are you building this thing that looks like Reddit or HackerNews rip off? Well… in my defense, Reddit, HackerNews, (and Google) do a great job in displaying list of interesting things effectively. It’s not a coincidence that I’m following the path of Reddit/HackerNews because I want to follow the path of success.

Besides that UX decision, I build this because I’m starting to have difficulties when blogging. The standards of blogging is going higher and higher. Blogging takes more than just well-written article these days. I have to stay consistent in following the blogs general theme. If I want to write slightly controversial topic, I better do a lot of research and write it in concise manner. When my post is mildly interesting, I have to be vigilant in responding to visitors in less than 24 hours time frame. It’s tough (I believe this is 1 of many keys to Twitter success, it’s very personal).

Those are too much burden for a programmer who have probably only 1 hour a week to write a blog post. Sometimes I just want to voice out my opinion regardless of the accuracy (I never policed any of my real life friends when it comes to factual accuracy, I’m hoping to experience the same thing online). I want to write something that’s interesting enough to create a conversation for social interaction and personal knowledge.

That’s why I defaulted back to Forum format. Forum is great, it doesn’t force people to use real name. Participation in a thread can extends to weeks, so that I have time to respond to conversation (just like mailing list).

Most forums have informal, laid-back conversation about common things that people like, such as OSS project, anime, coffee grinders, Mitsubishi Evolution, etc. There’s no pressure to be right, everyone is simply sharing and hanging out.

That’s why I build 6diagrams.

Technical

6diagrams is open source forum software. The project page can be found here. It is built using Python, Pylons, MySQL, TinyMCE, and Tokyo Tyrant.

For those who stopped by and created accounts, I hope you find 6diagrams enjoyable.

Construction (273/366 10-02-09)

Originally uploaded by CarusoPhoto

When I saw this nice trio of caution horses all in a row, I immediately put camera to eye and made an expsoure, figuring it would be a nice scene to continue my work with my vintage vintage 50mm Pentax lens on the K-7.

Using an old manual focus, manual aperture lens really gives one a sense of shooting with a film body. I also believe the image quality is…different…using an old manual lens rather than a new lens constructed for digital work.

First of all, there are several wiki posts at pylonshq.com already, below are some of them:

• http://pylonsbook.com/en/1.0/deployment.html
• http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Running+Pylons+with+NGINX
• http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Running+Pylons+with+SCGI+and+Lighttpd

I believe there’s not a single best solution in choosing any of these strategies. This post is intended as sharing my experience in some of these. I’m definitely not set on particular one and will change my mind once I gained better understanding.

My testing methodology

I’m currently testing multiple deployment configurations on the same app, thus giving me the opportunity to blog about it. I use Apache Benchmark (on client side), top and ps afx on server side. My machine is 1 Linode 1440 instance.

My AB setup are:

ab -n 500 -c 50 -k http://rootapp.com/

ab -n 1200 -c 50 -k http://rootapp.com/

ab -n 1500 -c 50 -k http://rootapp.com/

ab -n 800 -c 800 -k http://rootapp.com/

The results varied insignificantly with some subtle interesting differences. I’ll explain those below.

Note: I am testing these configuration on dynamic AJAX-y web application, thus reporting hard numbers is not very useful.

CherryPy vs Paste HTTP Server behind NGINX

One thing  that I noticed immediately is that CherryPy has better performance than Paste’s HTTP server. On both, having multiple processes does not help much on overall performance, but significantly reduces number of failed requests. When run under multiple processes, CherryPy consistently have the least number of failed requests.

For my setup having 7-8 processes is the sweet spot. When I have more than that, top is telling me that the latter processes are under utilized.

Setting up CherryPy on your production.ini is painless:

use = egg:PasteScript#cherrypy
numthreads = 20
request_queue_size = 512
host = %(http_host)s
port = %(http_port)s

By just comparing the two, CherryPy is easily the winner.

Lighttpd and SCGI

This gist is basic configuration to get SCGI up and running on lighttpd while the following is setup for your production.ini:

use = egg:Flup#scgi_thread
host = %(http_host)s
port = %(http_port)s

given the same AB configuration as CherryPy and Paste counterpart, lighttpd and SCGI consistently capable of handling 30 requests/seconds. About 8-10 requests/seconds more than CherryPy. Even though this setup is better, I noticed that memory consumption continues to go up after 2 weeks. I haven’t spend much time in investigating why. The reason I didn’t choose this path is more because I simply like NGINX better.

If only SCGI module on NGINX isn’t so experimental.

NGINX and FastCGI

This gist is basic configuration to get FastCGI running on NGINX while the following is setup for your production.ini:

use = egg:Flup#fcgi_thread
host = %(http_host)s
port = %(http_port)s

With this configuration, I consistently get about 25 requests/seconds. It’s a bit behind lighttpd and SCGI configuration. Interestingly, when run under ab -n 1500 -c 50 -k, this configuration hangs NGINX requiring it to be restarted. It only happen once though.

Again, when load balanced properly (depending on your app), any one of these configurations would work well. Hopefully this post can help others to get up to speed in Pylons deployment.

This is a simple how to for enabling OpenID authentication using Authkit (and Beaker, we need cooookies!!!) over WSGI.

The following snippet is inspired by the (broken?) example I found in the Pylons documentation wiki.

from authkit.authenticate import middleware, sample_app
from beaker.middleware import SessionMiddleware

app = middleware(
    sample_app,
    setup_method='openid,cookie',
    openid_path_signedin='/private',
    openid_store_type='file',
    openid_store_config='',
    cookie_secret='secret encryption string',
    cookie_signoutpath = '/signout',
)

app = SessionMiddleware(app, key='mysession', secret='randomsecret')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from paste.httpserver import serve
    serve(app, host='0.0.0.0', port=8080)

TODO: fix the broken example in the wiki (:

It’s the fourteenth post, and time to visit my favourite temple, Abydos, via the third of Osiris’ titles in this formula:

neb Abdju, Lord of Abydos.

We’ve done neb, haven’t we?  We can get straight on to Abdju:

Just for a change, I thought we’d compare handwritten hieroglyphs and the more detailed painted hieroglyphs for the whole word side by side.  They’re facing in opposite directions, but that’s not going to bother experienced office scribes, is it?  And I know you’re going to take the spelling variation in your stride.  As for the slightly different arrangement of hieroglyphs for the sake of artistic balance – pah!  We laugh in its face.

OK, let’s do a bit of dissection. 

The first sign is – well, no-one’s quite sure, but it could be a chisel. In which case, the blade is probably the wide, flat bit that looks like the handle.  It’s painted green in the inscription on the right, which would figure if it were copper or bronze .  (Almost the whole of the Pharaonic Period, took place in the Bronze Age in Egypt – something to contemplate while you’re waiting for that response from the IT helpdesk.)  The horizontal lines in the painted version may be cords lashing the blade to the handle.

So, when you’re drawing it, you need to draw a shape something like a short, wide vase or jar, then add a long thin shaft to the bottom.

The second sign (or the third sign in the painted version)

is a reinforcement of the b already present in Ab.  It’s a human foot, and in the second version painted the normal colour used for male skin in ancient Egypt – a dark, suntanned he-man red.  Ladies (and, in later periods, privileged men like scribes who worked indoors), were painted a pale yellow.

When you’re drawing your foot, give him a straight shin, an indication of the toes and heel and maybe a bit of instep – unlike the painted one, which seems to be flat-footed.  I know what that’s like and it’s cruel, so be kind to your hieroglyphs and don’t deform them (unless you’re writing them for someone ina  traditionally flat-footed profession, like the police).

Which brings us to the third sign (or second in the alternative version)

dju.  See how the artist in the painted inscription has given it a reddish, speckled, grainy appearance above a thick, dark baseline?  That is because the  dju hieroglyph is a depiction of the desert hills rising above the fertile plain of the Nile.  And the gap between the hills is where the sun would rise above or set below the horizon.  (The two pylons of a temple and the gap of the gateway also represent this idea.)

Finally, some familiar signs to complete the word;  the cute little quail chick reinforcing the u sound of dju in the painting; the city or village determinative, and the single stroke, as much to fill an otherwise empty space as for any other reason.

Abdju, or Abydos, was the major cult centre of Osiris in Upper Egypt, or the Nile Valley.  It’s not as easy to get there as it used to be, for security reasons, and there are restrictions on how long you can stay (nowhere near long enough) but it’s the most wonderful place. 

For one thing, it’s very ancient.  There are royal tombs out in the desert which date back to around the time of the unification of Egypt – the tombs of several “he of the sedges”.  In later times, the Egyptians believed that one of them was the tomb of Osiris himself, and it became a place of pilgrimage for people from all over the country.  There was a huge festival there every year, where mystery plays re-enacting the death and resurrection of Osiris and the battles of Horus and Seth were performed.  People came from far and wide to be part of them.

Kings built magnificent temples to Osiris there: the temple of Seti I is just about the only Pharaonic temple of any size with it roof intact.  This plus the fact that the Christians whitewashed over the walls  meant sthat the colours of  the reliefs are the best preserved of any Egyptian temple – and Seti I went for quality; just compare them with his son Ramesses II’s temple next door – even allowing for the fat that the roof is gone, there’s no comparison really.  Behind the Seti I temple is a highly intrguing underground temple called the Osireion, with an island in an underground lake, and…

Oh, I can’t wait to go back!. Go, go, go!

In order to have Beaker’s session applied to all subdomains, set cookie_domain to: .yourdomain.com (notice the dot in front).

In pylons, the cookie domain is available as: beaker.session.cookie_domain.

Also, in Google Group, Cezary mentioned to set also set sub_domain in routing.py

Note:

• This howto won’t work in Firefox. As far as I know, only Safari allows me to do this.

Reference:

• http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss/browse_thread/thread/db4054fa3cc3b8e7
• http://beaker.groovie.org/configuration.html?highlight=sub%20domain

I’ve always loved their sculptural drama. In Stoke, when I was young, there were a pair in a field that we used to climb to the point where a platform was framed with barbed wire that raked out at an angle. That stopped you getting to the top and electrocuting yourself, but it was high enough up that the fall could kill you.

5. Pylons

6. Pylons II

The South Luzon Expressway has undergone a major facelift. Additional lanes and fresh asphalt galore. These were taken on the way to and from work last year when the freeway was under reconstruction. Can’t take pictures anymore because it was great to drive uninterrupted, except for the portion where the Skyway works commence.

Today I finally got this tutorial working!

I’m trying to learn Pylons, it’s a good system, but the API is not very stable yet…

To get the thing to work I modified these things:
Add this to helpers.py:

from routes import url_for
from webhelpers.html.tags import *

Session got a new home:

from myblog.model import Session

There seems to be a bug in SQLite, it failed to create the database, but after I created it manually it worked fine.

It’s nice that Pylons include nosetest and TestUnit as part of its testing framework.

Unfortunately, using those for unit testing inside Pylons is not trivial, not obvious, and inconvenient.

For examples:

• I can only run nosetests on top-level directory because config is expecting ‘test.ini’ file. That’s inconvenient.
• It is not obvious how build sqlalchemy’s engine inside tests/__init__.py. Ideally, I can build the engine based on test.ini configurations.

To answer those questions, this is how my __init__.py looks like: [gist]

The __init__ file solves various problems:

• I can run nosetests anywhere inside project’s directory tree.
• With simple convention, __init__ will look for test.ini file on top-level directory.
• SqlAlchemy engine is built using configuration set in test.ini

I hope this snippet can help readers in getting up to speed in Pylons even quicker.

Check out more such images at No Promise of Safety, which features some of the work of ULiveandYouBurn.

Given the construction endemic to downtown Bank Street I almost feel like pulling off something like this. If only I had a street team…

For the longest time I kept staring at ‘plain text mode’ while editing Mako templates. No Mas!

TextMate bundle for Mako template has existed.

To install:

• cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/

• svn co http://svn.makotemplates.org/contrib/textmate/Mako.tmbundle

After Reloading your bundle, syntax highlighting is available under HTML (Mako).

Reference:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/922771/syntax-highlight-for-mako-in-eclipse-or-textmate

By default Mako HTML escapes all output.

To NOT have this behavior, change the setting of TemplateLookup in environment.py.

Resources:

• http://www.makotemplates.org/docs/filtering.html
• http://www.makotemplates.org/docs/unicode.html
• http://groups.google.com/group/mako-discuss/browse_thread/thread/535f3223a5f06660

So I’ve been playing with Pylons a bit. If you don’t know, Pylons “is a lightweight web framework emphasizing flexibility and rapid development.” It has a lot of the features that are expected from a modern MVC style web framework.

So what is so cool about Pylons? Well first off, it’s modular. If you are a Rails user, you’ll probably know that Rails 3 is going to become modular as well. This is very cool. It allows you to select the best project for a given task. In Pylons, this means you can use Mako, Jinja, or whatever else you want for a template engine. You can use SQLAlchemy, SQLObject, CouchDB, or nothing for your ORM. This is great and, in my humble opinion, the most logical way to work. Why bother reinventing the wheel, which you will end up making square, by the way, when you’ve already got a Ferrari? Granted, the Ferrari probably also has slightly square wheels but at least you didn’t have to make it. Pylons also suggests reasonable defaults (Mako and SQLAlchemy) if you’re overwhelmed by the options.

Pylons also has a feature that I haven’t really seen anywhere else, an Interactive Web Based Debugger. This means when your app blows up in development mode, you can instantly see the state of the objects in question, as well as examine the call stack at any point during program execution. Way cool!

I’ve not used Pylons for anything other than the toy apps in the tutorial examples, but I’m looking forward to learning more. I’m fully expecting run into crufty edges. Every framework has them. Pylons (and soon Rails 3) allows you to pick (hopefully) the least crufty thing for the job. I’ll be posting my impressions as I learn more about Pylons.

distance_of_time_in_words is a useful function that converts boring looking datetime into something more attractive (and SEO optimized) like: 30 seconds ago.

Pylons gain this functionality via WebHelper which blatantly inspired by Rails.

But, out of the box, this functionality does not exists in my templates. To enable it, I need to add this line in helpers.py:

from webhelpers.date import distance_of_time_in_words

Resource:

WebHelpers Documentation

http://workaround.org/pylons/pylons-cheatsheet.html

Hey, sorry there was no post yesterday

I’m a Korean. I love Korea. I love Korean food. I love Korean girls. I love Korea in general. Being Korean is great, it’s a little like, what do you call it, oh yeah,

A coincedence? I think not.

Oh yeah, I also love Starcraft. All Koreans love Starcraft. It’s the national sport there. What do you do if you live in Korea and also hate Starcraft? Simple, don’t live in Korea.

BUILD MORE PYLONS, SON

Hm. So, Korean parents, like all other Asian parents, care so very much about grades. So much, actually, that they seem like pylons, which are basically the foundation of a Starcraft society. To construct anything, you must first consruct those mother fucking pylons.

A+ MOTHA FUCKER

“Ohh… So you want to ‘chill’ with your ‘homies’, eh? WELL CONSTRUCT PYLONS FIRST, DAMMIT!!”

I’m pretty sure my mom said that to be once, actually, except instead of “construct pylons” she said “get your grades up”. See what I mean?

Also, Korean parents seem to lean towards girls a bit more, I don’t know how that’s like Starcraft, unless a girl is represented by an Ultralisk. Backed by the power of two angry Korean parents, you don’t want to mess with one of those.

Being Korean is about as fun as playing Starcraft. Since there aren’t that many Koreans, hanging out with someone who burns with Korean pride makes people feel unique. I bet there are less than 10 Koreans at my school. Half of them are probably boys. So if girls are looking to be original, I’ve got a 1 to 4 chance they’ll ask me out first, sweet.

A Korean girl - don't worry, they get better with age

Yup, that’s right, I want to be asked out by a girl. You see, Korean guys are shy as fuck. They can’t ask a girl out with turning so red, they stop looking Korean and start the Native American flow. That’s the number one reason all the girls we like go off and get hitched with white guys and we get stuck behind sucking dicks in the McDonald’s bathroom, hoping a girl will accidentally walk into the stall and you’ll fall in love. Which of course, never happens because even though girls love McDonald’s bathrooms, they’ll somehow get the idea you’re gay because you’re sucking men’s dicks there.

This is weird to me since even though I do the most retarded things, I can’t talk one-on-one well with any girl except my mom. My mom is not a love interest. Neither is my little sister or any of my older sisters. I can have one-on-one talks with them, but no, when Korean people are  born (anywhere), Kim Jong Fucking Il comes can takes there ability to talk with girls away, you know why? Because he didn’t become a movie director, that’s why. Similar to why Hitler became what he became, he got rejected from art school. Art school, man, chill out, there’s no reason to kill like 10 million people.

Missiles Versus Aliens, Rated G, by Pixar and Kim Jong Il

Just give Kim Jong Il a movie deal! Maybe he’ll stop playing with nuclear bombs and being a dictator and shit. Come to think about it, a movie by him would be great. It would be called “Missile+House” and that’s all it would be for 90 minutes. Film of the fucking year.

Oh wow, look  what happened to the Ultralisk! See? It was just a phase.

Ask me out. Oh yah, you can't, bitch

Hmm.. To finish this post up, lets talk about the name “Chae”, the name given to me by my parents.

Well, it’s a girl’s name.

I think that explains itself.

-Dong Saeng out

I started to read some pylons tutorials. I didn’t expect to understand so much!
If you know some python, visit the pylons site to learn about this framework.

I think you’ll like it !