I updated my Cover Art Resizer program.

New features:

• configurable output verbosity
• allows wildcards in directory names
• “force” switch for thumb.jpg re-creation

The program takes one or more paths as an argument, searches the entire directory tree for “cover.jpg” files and creates “thumb.jpg” files in 100×100 pixels size. It also embeds the thumb.jpg into the mp3s found in the directory.

It requires the Python Image Library and Mutagen. (If you have setuptools installed, the dependencies will be installed automatically)

You can install by running python setup.py install from the source code distribution or installing the supplied EGG or using the EXE.

Run coverresizer -h for help. (Your Python Scripts directory must be in the PATH)

Files:
Coverresizer 0.3 Source Distribution
Coverresizer 0.3 Windows Installer EXE
Coverresizer 0.3 EGG for Python 2.4

Brandon Corfman has just released kNose 1.0, a Komodo IDE/Edit extension for the Python unit testing framework “nose”.

Previous screenshots looked quite promising and I am looking forward to trying it out.

However, I won’t have the time at the moment, because of heavy workload and a non-pythonic day job.

Update: kNose 1.1 has just been released.

Michael Mahemoff, author of Ajax Design Patterns, has a nice overview of solutions for dynamic graphics on AJAX enabled web pages.

He covers eight different possibilities, most of them with code examples. It seems like there is still no real solution that works across all browsers and doesn’t require a plugin. Dynamic creation of SVG or VML code looks like the most appealing solution to me. However you would have to do both, depending on IE or other browsers.

Today one of the biggest regional internet providers in Germany experienced almost a complete loss of service (in German). Rumours go on that this had to do with a DNS problem.

No matter whether this was the real reason, it reminds me that we are heavily relying on DNS infrastructure when using internet services.
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For my non German readers: Maybe you have noticed the dog-ear at the top right corner of this weblog.

It’s from a campaign against the Directive on Mandatory Retention of Communications Traffic Data enacted in March 2006 by the European Union. Since the directive has passed the European Parliament, the fight against the directive now takes place in the member states.

I support this campaign, because I think data retention is no solution:

“Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of all 450 million people in the European Union. Data retention is a policy that expands powers of surveillance in an unprecedented manner. It simultaneously revokes many of the safeguards in European human rights instruments, such as the Data Protection Directives and the European Convention on Human Rights.” — www.dataretentionisnosolution.com

If you’re interested in the topic here is another link covering the topic.

One of these misunderstandings: I always thought foreach loops would create a temporary variable for the current element that would mask any variable with the same name in the current scope.

Obviously that is not the case, as I discovered when I tried to find a bug in Simple Tagging’s STP_RelatedPosts() function.

First I thought this was a PHP-only behavior… But see the following PHP and Python examples:
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I have a very cool Squeezebox WiFi MP3-Player which comes with a very cool music server software called Slimserver (written in Perl, Open Source, too!).
One thing this Slimserver can do is stream MP3 to every MP3 stream capable player. (Winamp, etc.)

The problem: How to access my music from any computer that has i.e. Winamp installed, without risking a big security breach at my home computer.
Solution: Secure the Slimserver with Apache as a proxy, using Apache’s SSL and authentication capabilities.
Catch: Winamp doesn’t do SSL and MediaPlayer isn’t to good at it, either.

The real solution: Access the management interface of Slimserver via SSL, protect it via some AuthType and allow unprotected, unencrypted access to the stream URL only from IPs that have previously accessed and successfully logged in at the SSL protected page.
I do that with mod_python and the various hooks it provides. Yes, you can do more with it than just executing Python scripts.
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Skunk Works has an article about how “The Future Won’t Be Statically Typed”.

There’s been many criticisms of duck typing but usually those voicing them don’t have an extensive experience of development using non statically typed languages or are Java fundamentalists.

Yeah. I agree with that. But I also think current dynamic languages are not the end of the story. Why is everybody thinking Types? Why not Interfaces? No, I don’t mean Java’s Interfaces — because they also rely on inheritance trees (or are the root of it). I think inheritance trees are the root of the problem.
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Brandon Corfman has written some cool extensions for Komodo that add support for the most important refactorings.
He is using Bicycle Repair Man! as the backend for the refactorings. Check out his blog for some other cool Python and Komodo stuff.

I am currently working on a larger article about extended authorization schemes with mod_python and Apache. You can expect it in a few days.

In this article I will show how you add metadata to any object and optionally change only part of its behavior (in this example the string representation __str__), while maintaining all other data and behavior of the object itself.
I will show how to write a class that dynamically decides which base class to use, based on the parameters that are passed to the constructor. I call that “dynamic inheritance”.

This way you can build universal decorators. (Decorators that work on more than one type.)
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