Technology

So I did some digging around after giving my off-the-cuff lightning talk at TriZPUG tonight and it looks like some other ex-rpathers (Thanks Dugan and Gafton!) have forked epdb. There's also the the rPath tree synchronized from here but this tree is missing some of the latest changes. The dugan tree is "python setup.py installable" now, instead of using make, and some shortcut documentation has been created, so I don't have to make this post as long as I thought I was going to have to.

For those who didn't see my little demo, epdb is like pdb (the standard Python debugger), but it adds multi-line text input, history and tab completion, nested debugging from the debug prompt, shortcuts to introspecting code, and a very nice post mortem debugger. Last, but not least, it also contains a server and client for remote debugging. The docs are still pretty sparse, but hopefully more attention can help fix that. I'd also be happy to answer questions about it.

Thanks to Chris Calloway, TriZPUG has a planet now. I don't know why it's taken me so long to connect with this group of people (I've been working with Python for 5 years now), but it's a pretty cool group from what I've seen so far. Thanks for making me (a TurboGears guy) feel welcome among all you Zope/Plone/Django developers.

Due to several shortcomings of the stock formencode email validator, I forked it and extended the test suite. This fixes the two most glaring issues I know of, namely the inability to handle unicode strings (international domains), and several problems with input checking (e.g., allowing commas) where invalid e-mail addresses make it through.

I did not write most of the code, I just refined it and added tests to exercise it. Let me know if it's useful to you, and if you find problems with it.

This technology is probably the only biofuel technology I'm really excited about. Unlike E85, it doesn't use food crops, and although algae based programs don't compete directly with food crops, they still require fermentation of cellulose, or refining of algae produced oil to create fuel. More links here and here. Joule Biotechnologies website here. I've been thinking for a while that we should be able to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and produce fuel. Now Joule has gone and built something that might be able to do that.

This week, Neil McAllister at InfoWorld wrote about User Interface (UI) design in applications (whether for in house or general use). He argues that the UI should be left to professionals, that the professional UI designers should be given final say in UI design, and that software suffers because developers are building the UI or the usability expert's concerns are dismissed or overruled by developer interests. I certainly have seen the "damage" that software developers can do when left in charge of user interaction; terse messages, techno-babble, pointless configuration options, arcane defaults, etcetera. I'm guilty of such damage myself, but I make no claims to expert status, though I'm a bit more motivated to acquire that status to improve my consulting business.

If you want to add support for third party certificates in your KDE 4 desktop, you'll have to work around this languishing bug. KDE for some arrogant reason includes its own certificate authority bundle located in /usr/share/kde*/apps/kssl/ca-bundle.crt, but doesn't provide the tools needed to modify the collection as a normal user. Therefore, as root, move this file out of the way, and link to your distribution's certificate bundle (typically in /etc/ssl/certs). This will let you use your distribution's SSL tools for managing SSL, rather than waiting for KDE to implement these important features. Changes to the distro's CA bundle will require restarting the applications using SSL/TLS before they can see the new root certificate authorities, but that's better than having to click through nag screens for certificates that should be trusted. We still have the security problem of not being able to verify certificates in any app but Konqueror, but the above fix removes the need to do that if you have a Root CA.

Ok, I'm not a novice when it comes to developing websites: I've been building web pages for close on 15 years. But within the last week, I've come across two browser behaviors (or perhaps they're browser addon behaviors) that make me scratch my head.

First, a request coming from something sending the User-Agent "Mozilla/4.0"-- yes, that's all, no clarifiers or parentheticals-- is lopping off the GET parameters when a popup is launched through a button click via an onclick handler. This site states that this is a Yahoo! search something, but the links are not something that a Bot would come across. On the other hand, there is no referrer sent, whick makes me think it could be some kind of link preloader or some other browser add on. Also, I saw a very similar error today coming from Firefox 3.0, though I'm not sure it's related.

Second, and this is really baffling: Sometimes I'm getting requests from a browser identifying itself as IE 6.x that has the entire URL made lowercase. I'm use nice REST-ful URLs for my application, so when a identifier comes across as lowercase, it throws off the lookup. Of course my own copy of IE 6 doesn't exhibit the behavior. For this particular case, I'm using JavaScript to build a URL, and then sticking it as the src attribute of an embedded iframe that is also being created by JavaScript. I'm seeing other errors in my logs though of IE6 and IE7 browsers going to different links (links that would typically be clicked or pasted from an e-mail) that are all lower case as well. Again, not sure if that's related, or if people are just typing them in (lazily) or if it's a browser bug. The only thing I can seem to find about this is this forum (news?) post from 2005 with no replies.

Of course my Google searching is revealing nothing to help me keep my hair, so I turn to the Lazy Web. Any ideas?

I'm working on some freelance work to rebuild a website that has a whole bunch of flash v4 movies that need to be moved forward to flash v9 or higher. I received a reference of a guy who does good work on the flash programming side of things, but finding a flash animator who isn't afraid of a little action scripting has proven extremely challenging. Anyone know of someone who is free for a project immediately?

I hate the way that tabular sorting is typically done in web apps (make links on every column with sort_order="columnname" or similar). It is tedious to code, and requires a lot of bandwidth and round trips from the server, not to mention additional load on the database.

Well, today I Googled a bit, and found SortTable.js. Add the script, and add a "sortable" class to the table you wish to sort, and you're done. It automatically detects string, numeric and date columns and sorts them using a very quick (though non-stable) sort.

I only had a very small problem (some of the CSS styles in FF3 stopped working) with the mechanism used to set the table up to be sortable (window.onload replacement), so I switched it to use jquery(document).ready, which happens later in the page loading process. Works nicely.

Check out the documentation for additional features.

I get asked a couple of times a week what's going on with the Foresight KDE edition, what is the status of KDE 4.x, and when is the KDE edition going to be released. I thought I'd blog so that something exists in Internet-firma that can be referred to and even "Googled".

First the status of KDE 4.1: I have no plans to build KDE 4.1 into Foresight. While a giant leap forward from what KDE 4.0 was, KDE 4.1 is still disappointing. Part of what happens when you rewrite rather than make incremental improvements is that functionality gets left behind, and some core functionality that I feel is essential to making a decent desktop experience for the end user is missing or buggy. Also, two of KDE 4.x's killer apps are less usable in 4.1 than they are in KDE 3.5.9: Amarok 2.0 lacks basic wholesale tag editing, dynamic playlists, and is a very buggy Alpha; and Kmail 4.2, part of Kontact is significantly slower than it's 3.5.x counterpart. Kontact itself doesn't yet feel cohesive when it comes to user interface interactions. There are a few KDE 4 apps that I would prefer over kde 3 though: kopete, konversation, potatoguy and many others show marked improvement.

Even though we won't be shipping KDE 4.1 in Foresight's KDE edition, it will be available to install side by side with 3.5.x in kde.rpath.org@fl:2-kde4.1-devel so long as someone is willing to maintain it.

For the KDE edition, there remain a few cosmetic issues with the theme, but mostly what we're missing is new ISOs on the release label and testing. If you'd like to help, jump in #foresight-kde on Freenode. I'm hoping that I'll be able to free up some time in the next few weeks to get us over the final hump.