Posts tagged Python

Previous entry. During the first day of the sprints I fixed a couple of small zope.testing test failures on Python 2.5, but didn't get anything significantly useful done. It was more of a leisurely walk than a sprint. At least I did get acquainted with the changed environment (buildout's bootstrap script that does exec urllib.urlopen('http://...').read() and requires the very latest bleeding edge setuptools that aren't in Ubuntu Feisty yet) and found a machine that still had Python 2.

The EuroPython conference was in my home town, Vilnius, this year. The conference is over now, but the sprints will continue until Saturday. If I had to pick the three most interesting (to me) talks, I'd choose Simon Willison's keynote about OpenID Brian Quinlan's talk about Measuring Web Services at Google Andrew Dalke's talk about Measuring Python performance Sadly, none of them have the slides available for download yet.

Certain things are not quite obvious in Zope 3. Custom traversal is one of those: I always have to go and look at an example when I need it. Here's the example: Say, you have a content object that provides IMySite and is exposed to the web at /mysite. You want to implement custom traversal for names under it, e.g. have /mysite/mycalendar return some object specific to the user that's currently logged in.

Our Zope 3 application had a speed problem: a view used to export an XML file with user data stored in the ZODB took two thirds of an hour. Clearly, the time to optimize it has arrived. I've been indoctrinated by reading various sources (Federico Mena-Quintero's blog is a good one) that you must do two things before you start fiddling with the code: Create a reproducible benchmark Profile Step one: benchmark.

My sleep schedule is totally out of whack. I cannot sleep before 3 AM (sometimes I stay awake until 7 AM), then I cannot get up before noon. As a result I have more free time for hacking. Today I tried to play around with Metacity's compositor, with some mixed success. I also built a patched FBReader with a numeric page indicator tweaked to the size and position of my liking (screenshot).