After 4 years of usage, my Kiss DP-558 recorder is dead. Done. No longer working. And the Kiss website is down as well. Cisco/Linksys has taken over and shut down Kiss Technologies. More’s a pity that they never *did* anything with what they bought…

A mains current failure that came and went made sure that it died an agonizing death, always switching on and then switching off again. I’m sorry to see you go mate, you earned the ‘wife-acceptance’ trophy, which is hard to come by.

So I’m looking for a replacement. I’ve finally settled on a Emtec S800 (I originally bought the S800H, but this only has a digital tuner, not an analog, and we’re still (stubbornly) analog.

Still, no more Electronic Program Guide to pick and choose from. And still no H.264 (which the S800H did have) codec support. And no more having something decent looking under your televison that fitted in with the Hi-Fi equipment.

Bummer.

For those few regular readers out there, they have probably noticed that I no longer post regularly about Adobe Flex.

Please be assured that this is not out of the picture ! Rather, I wanted to learn Flex enough to get by in it. It’s been *very* interesting, but also very hard sometimes to wrap my head around Actionscript and MXML. Now that I know a bit about what I can do with Flex, I’ve started again with Python and more specifically with CherryPy.

CherryPy is a very easy-to-use web framework that you can use to set up your own webserver in a flash. It provides a basic syntax for setting up the webservice, then scurries out of the way, letting you ‘get on with it’, whatever that may be.

Currently I’m setting up a local Webserver (using CherryPy) and this is where most of my time has gone to.

Once the python application on there has been created (and most of it has) I then will head back to Flex and it’s usages as a reporting tool – I’ll be trying to use PyAMF as the glue between python functions and Flex datagrids.

Anyways, more on that later…

I recently discovered feedparser.py, a library written by Mark Pilgrim that is amazing if you want to use python to consume rss feeds. It ‘normalizes’ the different versions of rss/atom out there into one request that you can use consistently. Doesn’t matter if it’s atom 0.1 or 0.3

A few links that are interesting together with feedparser.py as they show it’s usage:

• feedparser.org main page, which gives some examples
• Using feedparser.py to query twitter and putting those tweets on your website
• how to store rss content in a database using feedparser.py

I’m constantly amazed about the quality python code that is out there and you can just find via a simple google query. It certainly makes me think that choosing Python over, say Perl, was a good decision.

As for using feedparser.py to put relevant tweets on your website, note that you can also use javascript to achieve the same thing; go here for some twitter.com goodies and an explanation on how to set this up.

Only recently I’ve discovered the power of ‘re’ the python regular expression library. Instead of writing long functions that process text character by character to add or remove stuff, you use re, write and expression in regex that achieves what you want and basta! in a few lines things get done.

For example the following function will remove any html tags (preventing Cross Site Scripting) and escape the rest of whatever the user types in:

Remove the dashes when you copy the code – they were added to show the necessary indentation. And for full disclosure : I took the compile statement from the following site (I’m not a regex expert).

So you can call this function from somewhere in your python code and the result will be ’scraped clean’ of all tags beginning with < and ending with > plus any ampersands other other special characters get to be ‘escaped’.

YMMV – this is very likely not a complete protection against all the things a hacker can input in your website, but it’s certainly a start.

Yep. This is droolworthy.

This is soooo cool.

Creating an AIR badge for an Adobe AIR application is a bit of a hassle, but the following 2 Wordpress plugins really do take all the work out of it. Any post where you want to add an Air badge, you’re done in 3 minutes.

You’ll need either one of the following plugins:

- The Original plugin, made by Peter Elst, which is easy to use
- The Updated plugin with built-in click tracking (requires a bit more work)

I decided to use the original plugin, and you need to do just 3 things to use it.

1. install the plugin (in your admin menu, just go to the plugin section and use the “search plugins” button to search for “air badge”
2. upload your .air file to the server (if you want to use the wordpress “Add Media” uploader, you might also need to install an additional plugin called “PJW mime-config” and add .air to the list.
3. create your badge by writing the following magic words between the words ‘airbadge’ : application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg

You’re done ! Admire your work (and that of the guy who made it possible, Peter Elst)!

When I upgraded from Mac OS X 10.6.0 to 10.6.1, suddenly my 2006 iMac became a sluggish beast, trashing the disk for every little thing that it needed to do. Changing to another virtual desktop became 10 seconds of pure torture instead of a slick swish… At first I thought this had nothing to do with the upgrade, and thought my disk might be going bad.

Onyx, the all-in-one swiss knife of maintenance tools that I ran found out that I had a disk error. I fixed this by rebooting with the Leopard install disk and using disk utility there to correct the error. But my iMac kept being sluggish. Launching programs became an interminable wait (ok, ok, 10 seconds are not interminable, but they do add up in the long run when you want to get things done !)

Now that I upgraded to Mac Os X 10.6.2 things are suddenly running smoothly once again. I don’t know what happened, but they did something !

Python Package Manager Logo

The Python Package Manager is here, a visual tool for the python developer to find and install all the necessary packages.

It shows you what is already installed on your system, with the option to deinstall the packages, and by typing into the search box you can find additional packages and install them, all graphically. It’s supposed to be cross-platform, but the homepage of the developer only provides a windows download option.

I just hope this gets used and keeps being supported, as it is a lot handier than using the command line ! I do think you still need easy_install and wxpython/wxwidgets though…

I updated my little AIR application called WeightManDesktop (which uses data from WeightMan, a free  iPhone application made by Katachi Studios) to version 0.2.

Changes in version 0.2:

• Calculates the minimum and maximum weight
• Calculates the minimum BMI
• Both the weight graph and the BMI graph now don’t start from 0 – instead they use the minimum values to calculate the begin value of the graph
• The graphs are much more clear now and the changes in weight show up more distinctly.

You can download version 0.2  of the program by clicking on the install badge. Version 0.1 entry and description can be found here.