The Occasional Occurence

I think that this blog entry at Coding Horror pretty much nails why I enjoy programming.

At my previous job we took this personality test of sorts called StrengthsFinder that is supposed to help reveal your top 5 strengths. I took it twice and while some of the results varied, I had Learner in my list both times.

Programming is a real outlet for that constant desire to learn something new. There is always a new problem to be solved, a new tool to be created.

Fun stuff!

cw

Inspired by wsgicollection, I cooked up a collection implementation for CherryPy 2.2.x. Here is the docstring for the base Collection class:

A class representing a collection of items.

Items can be created, updated, viewed, listed and deleted.  Dispatches
based on HTTP method and URL fragments.

Classes that need to implement collection-like behavior should inherit from
this class and supply Python method for handling desired HTTP methods.

Something to be aware of is that handlers for the various collection
operations are not "exposed" in the traditional CherryPy sense.  Instead,
they are mapped in the following manner:

HTTP methods meant to operate on the collection and individual collection
items are mapped to handlers in the col_dict and item_dict class attributes,
respectively.

When a GET request is made for a resource identified by a noun like
/creator_page, a "get_creator_page" method is looked up in the collection
object.  The same thing for a PUT request to /45;metadata - a handler named
"put_metadata" would be looked up in the collection object, and the item
number would be passed in as the first argument to the method.

LIMITATION: only integer item IDs are supported.

The soon-to-be-released CherryPy 3 should make this type of dispatching even easier, but sometimes it's fun to teach an old dog new tricks ;-)

cw

Anyone who reads Wired magazine and is following the new "the-chosen-one-python-web-framework" saga should find this little bit familiar. Here is my (tongue-in-cheek) take on the current state of Python web dev...

Wired: WWGD Tired: WSGI Expired: CGI

In case you missed it, WWGD == 'What Would Guido Do?'

If you are reading this, it means I successfully migrated dowski.com to my new server.

The whole server conversion wasn't too painful. I got my new VPS (Virtual Private Server) from VPSLand last Friday. I only had a few OS choices, none of them being Slackware, so I went with Debian (my other choices were Fedora Core, CentOS, Gentoo or RedHat 9). The server setup took about 36 hours, which seemed a bit long to me.

Debian Linux is pretty nice. I have messed with it a little bit in the past, but most of my experience with Linux has been on Slackware. I like apt-get for managing software and I think I'll like aptitude once I figure out why it sometimes lets me install stuff and doesn't other times.

Moving my blog was a breeze. I backed up my database with mysqldump, copied it to the new machine, ran "cat dbbackup.sql | mysql -p dbname", moved the Wordpress files, edited db username and password for the new machine, and setup a new virtual host in Apache 2. I also had to move my rewrite directives for pretty URLs. I am surprised that there hasn't been a syntax change between Apache 1.3 and 2.

Moving my projects site was super easy as well. The projects site runs Brockman, a CherryPy application I wrote. To move it, all I had to do was move the application directory, get the necessary Python modules installed, start the CP app server and proxy requests from Apache to the CP server.

For email, I decided to give Google's "hosted" Gmail a spin, so I'm not hosting my own email. That is actually kind of nice, because I get to keep my dowski.com email address but use all the great features of Gmail. It also takes some load off of my VPS, which only has 96MB of RAM allotted to it.

I am hosting my own DNS and got free secondary DNS from Twisted4Life. However, my domain registrar has a stupid control panel that is keeping me from using ns1.dowski.com as a nameserver. Thus, my DNS setup is not quite complete yet.

So there you have it. I'm sure there are going to be some "404 Not Found" casualties for some stuff, but hopefully I'll get it sorted out in the coming days and weeks.

cw

Be prepared for some downtime at dowski.com. I am going to be switching OS, servers, networks, DNS, etc. in the next few days. Hopefully it won't be too painful :-)

cw