splee.blog

According to Guido Van Rossum, YouTube is written almost entirely in Python.

My thoughts exactly.

Recently, pastebin.com has been having performance issues and I’ve been struggling to find an alternative that does syntax highlighting in enough languages to satisfy my needs. I tend to sit in #turbogears a lot and help people new to TurboGears when I can and a pastebin is invaluable in that situation.

From this need, Stickum was born. It’s a very simple TurboGears application that accepts pastes and… well, pastes them, and it does syntax highlighting for a variety of languages so it’s not just for Pythonistas.

Give it a whirl.

Arkivo has reached the heady heights of version 0.2! This version incorporates a complete rewrite of the IRC bot to allow it to connect to multiple servers. This means Arkivobot is no longer restricted to Freenode, but can roam the networks freely as is a bot’s want. Arkivobot is currently connected to Freenode and OFTC, but if you want your channel archived and you’re on another network I can easily accomodate you (email me for more details)

Because of the addition of multiple networks I had to change the URL structure. For example, to access the archive for #turbogears:

Old URL: http://irclog.turbogears.org/archive/turbogears/
New URL: http://irclog.turbogears.org/archive/freenode/turbogears/

This will prevent URL clashes in case a channel has the same name on two different networks. Arkivo is nice and freindly though; if you use one of the old URL’s you will be redirected and asked to update your bookmarks.

Also included in this version is a visible bot status and a bugfix to prevent the bot dying if it encounters encoding that isn’t supported by the channel.

Thomas Hervé recently posted the answer to one of my lesser prayers to the MochiKit mailing list last week: A port of the scriptaculous effects and drag & drop libraries to use Mochikit.

Basically this frees you from the extra overhead of both the scriptaculous and prototype .js files. I was using scriptaculous for the sole purpose of creating effects. Mochikit has always done all the real work as I understand it a lot better than any other library. The best thing about this port is that, aside from the different script tags, the code for creating and using the effects doesn’t have to be changed at all! It’s literally a drop-in replacement.

This adds to mochikit the one thing that was missing and has made me a lot happier in using it as I don’t have to worry about the bandwidth being wasted on some hefty js files just to make things slide and fade out.

Kudos to Thomas, and many thanks.

I don’t have a problem with learning a new language, but JavaScript has always bugged me*. There’s just no decent way to catch those complicated bugs, as using alert() and document.write() just doesn’t cut it for really big stuff.

Enter Venkman, stage right.

Venkman is just awesome. It includes features that allow you to set breakpoints and watches, view variables and their values, and (most importantly IMHO) has an interactive console. Being a Python programmer I’ve found that interactive consoles are the key to getting something working. No more making a change, reloading the page and figuring out what went on. You can load the page and simply execute the JavaScript in real time. For a JS newbie the ability to do that is an absolute lifesaver.

If you want to learn how to use Venkman, there is an excellent guide that’s “slightly more useful than a towel“. I highly recommend you check it out, even if you’re only going to use Venkman once or twice a month.

* Apologies. It seems like I’m getting some bad influences from somewhere. I never used to make puns like this!