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Lion: Spotlight still broken
I’ve installed Mac OS X 10.7 (upgrading from 10.6) and was very interested to see how the new search tokens feature would work in Spotlight. But on my Mac it doesn’t. Here’s the result of a search for...
View ArticleXPath bug in old versions of ElementTree
I figured out why my XML parsing code works fine using the pure-Python ElementTree XML parsing module but fails when using the speedy and memory-optimized cElementTree XML parsing module. The XPath 1.0...
View ArticleFree software FTW! Updated filetimes.py
Two years ago (flippin’ heck it seems like only yesterday) I wrote about converting between Unix timestamps and Windows timestamps using Python. In that post I linked to my very simple implementation...
View ArticleDate variables in InDesign
Interesting InDesign problem: the format for a modification date variable changes per document. (This post describes a problem using Adobe InDesign CS4 but applies just as well to CS5 and CS5 and a...
View ArticleWidths & Heights with xlwt + Python
This article about using xlwt to generate Excel in Python reminded me I needed to see exactly how to set column widths (the xlwt documentation doesn’t cover it). Let’s create a new Excel workbook and...
View ArticleSharpZipLib and Mac OS X
TL;DR When creating zip archives with SharpZipLib disable Zip64 format if you care about Mac compatibility. Extra TL;DR When creating zip archives with SharpZipLib make sure you set the file size,...
View ArticleSharpZipLib and Mac redux
I wrote a blog about generating Mac-compatible zip files with SharpZipLib, the conclusion of which was to disable Zip64 compatibility. It was wrong, wrong I tell you. The better solution is to just set...
View ArticleInspecting your routes in Bottle
Marcel Hellkamp recently added a small feature to Bottle that makes it easy to inspect an application’s routes and determine if a particular route is actually for a mounted sub-application. (Bottle is...
View ArticleCustom template folders with Flask
Someone was asking on Flask‘s IRC channel #pocoo about sharing templates across more than one app but allowing each app to override the templates (pretty much what Django’s TEMPLATE_DIRS setting is...
View ArticleA context manager for files or file-like objects
I usually design my Python programs so that if a program needs to read or write to a file, the functions will take a filename argument that can be either a path string or a file-like object already...
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How to fix “ghost” files in the Finder
Sometimes the Mac Finder can get its knickers in a twist about files that you ought to be able to open just fine but Finder says no. You may see a message that says “Item XYZ is used by Mac OS X and...
View ArticleOptimizing queries in Haystack results
My Adobe software updates app (which uses Haystack + Django to provide a search feature) has a very inefficient search results template, where for each search result the template links back to the...
View ArticleTesting with Django, Haystack and Whoosh
The problem: you want to test a Django view for results of a search query, but Haystack will be using your real query index, built from your real database, instead of an index built from your test...
View ArticleGrouping URLs in Django routing
One of the things I liked (and still like) about Django is that request routing is configured with regular expressions. You can capture positional and named parts of the request path, and the request...
View ArticleJinja2 templates and Bottle
Although Bottle’s built-in mini-template language is remarkably useful, I nearly always prefer to use Jinja2 templates because the syntax is very close to Django’s template syntax (which I am more...
View ArticleTiny speed-ups for Python code
Here’s a bunch of examples looking at micro-optimisations in Python code. Testing if a variable matches 1 or none of 2 values You have a variable and want to test if it is any of 2 values. Should you...
View ArticleMetadata on App Engine
There are various bits of metadata about your project and the current request available to your Web app when running on Google App Engine. Let’s see what they are. These notes show how to access things...
View ArticleFinding the Cloud Tasks location from App Engine
When using the Google Cloud Tasks API you need to specify the project ID and location. It would be good to not hard-code these for your app, and instead determine the values when the application starts...
View ArticleFind your website’s URL on Cloud Run
If you have a Python app on Google Cloud Run, how can your app determine its own website URL? When you deploy to Cloud Run, you specify a service name, and every app deployed to Cloud Run gets a unique...
View ArticleNotes for logging with Python on App Engine
These are my notes for how logging works for Python applications on Google App Engine and how it integrates with Cloud Logging. I used the logging_tree package to understand how Python’s logging system...
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