Technical Ramblings

Hula – Open Source Groupware for the Corporate Soul.

There’s lots more out there on all aspects of this than I care to even think about, but some of the things that Nat has written about it in his weblog sound pretty cool. Personally, I have only one wish for this product: for it to become something that I can use in the workplace for task/appointment management. Currently, we’re in a 20% Windows/80% Mac world, but all the appointment management is done through Outlook and ACT!. The number of times I’ve heard the people who use it cursing ACT! is way too high, and it has the obvious problem that the rest of the office can’t use it.

I need to learn to accept that not everything is going to validate, and I need to learn that hacks and workarounds are a way of life. I need to accept that Javascript really is here to stay, and do more to learn how to make good Javascript applications, because really, they can make the entire user experience way better. Software isn’t about perfection, it’s about doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, and making things better for the user.

I wonder what I could start with… a project to learn some of the more advanced Javascript technology, while still keeping the interface usable for non-Javascript enabled browsers, allowing for linking, and so on. Google’s interfaces don’t work so well for this: Gmail, Orkut, and Google Maps all fail miserably without Javascript. I don’t like that.

Ponder ponder…

Around the time that Nokia Python was released, someone mentioned that it would be very interestig to see a replacement for the built in Nokia Notepad program. The Notepad program has many limitations: you can’t fit much text on a screen, there’s no easy way to browse or link notes you’ve written, all the typical limitations that you see when writing in a small paper notepad.

It was discussed that a small, wiki-like implementation might be a way to improve the usability of the notepad. Allow people to link between pages or nodes, let them type what they want and link it together. This would greatly improve the usability of having a phone along with you: if you can take notes on it that you can actually usee, there’s less chance you’ll lose them than paper, and you’re far more likely to be able to use something that’s connected than just write one note to yourself.

For a while, I didn’t develop anything on the phone, mostly due to technical issues related to my development process. However, after the recent Python SIG meeting, I decided that the next time I saw people, I wanted the phone to do something useful. So, I took on the challenge: a wiki-like scratchpad.

I started last night, and didn’t get too far before I ran into some symbian related problems: I couldn’t get anydbm to save anything. The file would open, it would stay open, but it wouldn’t sync, and it wouldn’t close. This morning, I finally looked at some code, and realized – wait. I need a full path. And once I got that far, things started looking up. In the hour I had this morning before work, I hacked out the basics: open a node, write to it, save, exit. Paavo on #mobitopia pointed out some other issues: the exit key handler, for one.

Then, over lunch, I created a webpage, and fleshed it out a bit more: adding a feature such that when you hit the action button, the word underneath the cursor is opened as a new node. This was about another two hours of work, spread over lunch and 10 minute breaks from work throughout the day. This included writing a program that catches keypresses and displays their associated keycodes, including learning a bit more about lambdas than I used to. I then had a working wikipad, and have since been adding minor cleanup tweaks.

In the past hour, I’ve created a beta, which allows uploading the wiki database to a webpage as POST data, from which it can be done with what you wish. (I’m currently storing the data in print_r() form, just for the sake of doing so.) From here, it’s pretty easy to imagine how this could allow reimporting the data.

So, the next step is, of course, making this work in a collaborative sense: allowing multiple people to edit one wiki via their phones. However, for the time being, it’s a great little scratchpad app, that’s only likely to get greater. You can get the code from the WikiPad Homepage.

I posted recently about Zeroconf, which allows for automated service discovery. One aspect of this which has already been exploited is the ability to have a local network of presence information, something like what iChat does to announce users who are online. However, it also passes along some simple FOAF information with it. I can’t remember who wrote the tool. If I recall correctly, it was shellac/Damien… ah, here we go. foaffinger.

Small HTTP server combined with zeroconf shares data.

Now, to expand this out a bit… now that I’m starting to know how to deal with Python a bit better, I might be able to do something with pyzeroconf and pyrple. I’d probably want to learn something about graphics too… wxPython requires an install. Are there any “built in” GUIs for Python? I don’t think so.

Anyway, local FOAF browsing of full data rather than just a subset would be nice. Not too hard, I don’t think, since Python makes almost everything simple. Of course, there is the problem that there’s no one that I share my network with… 😉

Ah well, I do have 2 macs, 2 linux boxes, and 2 windows laptops in the house now. (Wow! An even split. Nifty.) I can try it out somehow or another.

I’m kind of rambling. Usually I’d reserve this for noets, but I wanted a tie in from the Zeroconf post I just made.

There’s not a lot of webpages out there on the neat things you can do with Zeroconf. For some reason, this surprises me. I feel like it’s a pretty interesting technology, but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s done much with it, despite the fact it’s been around for quite a while. For example, AaronSw wrote about zeroconf more than two years ago.

For those who may have missed the boat, the primary thing that I mean when I talk about Zerconf is automated service discovery (DNS-SD). This is the kind of thing that allows iTunes to see the other computers locally that are also sharing iTunes music. Apple has put a lot of work into making this stuff simple, to the point that it’s one of their more popular open source releases. (Their mDNSResponder code, that is.) I know that Gnome is putting a lot of effort into making things like this work, but I don’t run Gnome (I’m a minimalist) so I don’t know where that’s really at.

Earlier tonight, I was having some problems announcing services over Rendezvous, which is the only way that iTunes will attempt to talk to a DAAP share – there’s no way to tell iTunes “go to this IP address”. This is probably by design: this way I can’t open up someone’s music share that’s not announcing it locally. Kind of annoying for me, since I’d like to be able to play my music from home at work, which I would be able to do with DAAP otherwise After some trouble, I eventually got my machine to announce the iTunes share (which is done via mt-daap) on my Linux box, so I can now play that music. I also added a few other Services: HTTP and SSH. Still, I don’t really know what I can do with these. Why doesn’t putty or some other app capitalize on this by offering to search local hosts for SSH? Does no one really use local services that this could make easier?

My Zeroconf stuff comes from Howl, which offers a multi-platform open-source solution to providing Zeroconf services. It’s a decent library, with decent tools. It is a bit iffy on the user-level: The error messages are pretty unspecific. For example, if you try to announce a service before first running mDNSResponder, it will give an error message that it is unable to connect: but won’t tell you where or why, nor is it mentioned in any documentation (that I can find). The code itself seems solid, however, and is working well here. So, what cool ideas are there for Rendezvous that no one has done anything with? And who’s going to step up to the plate to start?

One example I can think of: set up Rendezvous to announce your local MySQL servers. Then, if you’re in an office where you do development, you can just pick from a drop down of development servers: you don’t have to depend on static IP addresses, you can just scroll through a list. You can even use the text fields of the Rendezvous to include a Guest login. Seems like something that would work well for CocoaMySQL. Of course, it doesn’t look like it’s been touched for more than a year, so it’s not likely to change in the near future. Just an idea.

What zeroconf does not do, which many people don’t seem to understand, is provide any real help in actually creating the connections. Lots of people, myself included, seem to think “Rendezvous” is this magical tool that does all the network communication for you. (That is, I used to think that way – I know better now.) Really, all it does is give you an IP address – nothing that a relatively tech savvy person couldn’t do on their own, at the application level. The communication actually takes place over the typical channels – regular socket communication.

So, although Zeroconf/Rendezvous is cool, it’s not an “end all/be all” to network communication. Just something to keep in mind.

My pet Python project is redlandbot, the most popular manifestation of which is julie, an irc bot. Basically, the service allows for adding data from a URL to the local model, and then running RDQL queries against that model. As the name implies, it’s built as a layer on top of Redland, using the Python language bindings.

One of the biggest complaints about using julie, or at least, one of my biggest complaints, is that it requires namespaces to be used explicitly in some cases. Or should I say, that *was* was one of my biggest complaints: I just fixed it.

From now on, julie will automatically add namespaces to a query. It checks if there already are any (by looking for ” using <"), then adds the rest of the predefined namespaces, trying to match syntax. There may be some commands which break because of multiple spaces between "using" and "<". If there are any, feel free to fix them by simply pulling the namespaces out of the command: they will be added automatically. This allows for more complex queries with less work, which is always a good thing. Any bugs can be reported to me. This has been on my wish/todo list for way too long, and it's good to have done. I should really work on fleshing out julie/redlandbot as a web service a bit more, I think. It'd be nice to be able to just set up the service on a webpage, and use the ircbot as a very high level transport between IRC and the web interface: this would allow me to move the bot around a bit more, without needing to install Redland to use it (occasionally a bit of a pain, due to dependancies, mostly because I suck at resolving them without root).

Recently, a number of local Python users have assembled some form of organization, to the point that there is actually now relatively regular meetings of these groups of people (before other Linux Users Group gatherings, thus far). With the recent Nokia Python announcement, there’s been some renewed interest in my mobile python work, so I’m hopefully going to get some of that into shape over the weekend for a demonstration to the group on Monday, assuming I can make the meeting.

For those of you who have an interest in Python: What do you think would be interesting to a bunch of Python coders as a demonstration? Is there something that’s particularly spiffy that I could show off, or convert from being a command line application to being a cell phone application? Note thave I’m thinking relatively simply here: I only have a relatively limited memory space to work in, and I only have a small subset of modules to work with, and I’m in Python 2.2.

So, what do you see as being interesting topics/programs to demonstrate to the world the power of Python on the cell phone?

I’m really looking forward to getting together with a bunch of like-minded hackers, and racking their brains on what I can do better. I’ve never really had a good development process before, but Python developers seem to have one, especially the ones that I’ve seen discussing things on the mailing list. I’m used to LiveJournal’s spaghetti code, or writing in PHP which is typically not so well tested. It’ll be interesting to enter conversations with a group of more “formal” developers than myself.

Just looking for thoughts on what I should be working on.