Schinckel.net

For my day job, I am developing a SOAP server in python. I have been using ZSI as a framework, and it is very good. It will, with mod_python, allow you to build a complete application in python (and even without mod_python you can have it as a standalone process). One of the touted features is easy return of lists and dictionaries, without having to declare ComplexTypes classes.

However, it doesn’t quite work. And the not-working-bit is really odd.

If you return a dict, such as the following:

  return {"uid":23,"gid":993,"cid":333}

Then ZSI creates a SOAP response like:

    <uid id="1234" xsi:type="xsd:int">23</uid>  
    <gid id="5678" xsi:type="xsd:int">993</gid>  
    <cid id="0987" xsi:type="xsd:int">333</cid>

But, if you return a dictionary with values that happen to be the same, as I did with my boilerplate code:

    return {"uid":"xsd__string",
            "gid":"xsd__string",
            "cid":"xsd__string"}

Then it fails. The second and any other instance of any dict key where the value has already been used by another key is empty, and the wrong type:

    <uid id="1234" xsi:type="xsd:string">xsd__string</uid>  
    <gid href="#5678"></gid>  
    <cid href="#0987"></cid>

This can be overcome with liberal use of classes (or subclasses, since most of the time I am returning dicts or lists). It is a bit of a pain in the arse, though. I’ve filed a bug report. And stopped using ZSI. If I found this bug this fast, then I don’t want to know how many more there are. It’s just easier to convert the XML to python objects and back again, and package it up to look like a SOAP request. Which is kind of what SOAP does anyway.

Well, the 4GB of PC2-5300 SO-DIMM RAM I ordered arrived today. I got it very cheap on eBay, and was pretty worried about it. But it all seems pretty stable so far - Rember tells me it is all okay, and it seems to be running smoothly.

Upgrading the RAM in a MacBook Pro is a piece of cake - took less than 5 minutes, including waiting for the machine to shut down and then start up after replacing the sticks. Had three small philips head screws to remove, after taking off the battery. Then the RAM came out fairly easy, and the new sticks were in.

I used the 2x 1G sticks from the laptop to upgrade my Media Centre - the Mac Mini (jens) seems to like the doubling of RAM she got too. Having said that, opening the case up was a bit trickier, but took less than 30 minutes anyway. The longest time was spent trying to figure out why the external HDD wouldn’t mount (because I had turned it off), then why it wouldn’t turn on (apparently it needs to be connected to a firewire port first).

The extra RAM in my laptop means I can finally run a VMWare machine without having to set aside 15 minutes for the machine to respond enough to be usable. I know this isn’t just a problem with the particular VM file, since this is a brand new VM. The old one was even worse! Having said that, I’m not about to use it all of the time. Although once it is running, it goes okay, it still consumes a fair chunk of the RAM.

Speaking of RAM use, I’m running a few Dashboard widgets, a couple of which use up 15MB of RAM each. DoBeDo and iStat widget seem to be the culprits. I think I’ll kill DoBeDo - I use Anxiety as my main ToDo viewer, which uses half of the RAM of DoBeDo. It’s just nice that whenever I go into Dashboard it’s there to remind me. I often use iStat widget just to keep a track on stuff, so that can stay too.

After a nearly 10-year hiatus, I’m back at Uni. And loving it.

I’m currently sitting in the Flinders Uni “Coopers” bar, having a nice cold Pale Ale. My first day of Uni was today, and so far it’s pretty cruisy.

I actually finished the first two afternoons’ work in the first half of the first afternoon. The lectures didn’t really give me much new, it’s all just aligning what I already know about OOP with the syntax of java.

The thing that actually took me the longest today was remembering how many degrees are in the internal angles of a regular pentagon. I ended up having to fire up a python interpreter to keep a track of all of my maths. I think I would have finished in half the time it took me otherwise. That, and having to remember to declare variables…

So, Java is looking easy so far, and from what I can see the next 2.5 weeks are going to be more of the same. About time I started to get High Distinctions, I think. I’m finding plenty of time to listen to Late Night Cocoa, and learn Objective C/Cocoa while I learn Java.

I don’t like doing technical support. It is just not something that I find enjoyable at all. I don’t mind fixing the occasional computer - I had a mate’s PowerBook G4 for a few days the other day, and even got a bit miffed by how frustrating that was. Long story short - it seemed like the hard drive was buggered, but after replacing that (which was very hard), I by chance removed and reinserted the RAM, which doesn’t require a complete disassembly, and it booted fine. I then spent 40 minutes fixing my sister’s laptop’s internet. Which again I didn’t mind, as I was the one who had left it set up to use a static IP address when i was working on getting an ad-hoc WiFi network going. It took 40 mins to fix something that if I had the machine in front of me (or even VNC), I probably could have fixed in 4.

One thing I will be doing at my job is some technical support for a specialist software package. I’ve listened to my boss (still sounds weird calling him that, since he’s a mate of way back) and I really don’t think it will be fun. I can already parrot a heap of the phrases he uses several times a day, and I’ll be heading out with him to do some site visits late this week or next.

Well, I’m not the person to tell that sometimes you have to do stuff you don’t really like, just to keep the money rolling in. How many years was I a teacher for again?

•

Whilst trying to tag this post, I realised that I don’t have as much to rant and rave about since I am not a teacher. I’m not the angry young man I was. Still, this is as close to a rant as I am getting, so it’s going in that pile…

Apparently, EyeTV 3 will be released today (Tuesday). I did read somewhere that this version will be a fully-fledged media centre, but maybe that’s just rumour and innuendo.

I hope not. I’d love it to access and display data from iTunes, since I’ve painstakingly put most of my pre-EyeTV (and saved-from-EyeTV) media into iTunes.

I never thought I’d manage to find a job coding in python for a living. But that is what my full-time job is, right now, anyway.

I can’t really talk about the work I’m doing, since it is a commercial enterprise, but I can talk about what sort of things I am coding. I have spent the last couple of weeks rebuilding a server in python that uses SOAP to communicate with the outside world (well, a client application, anyway) over SSL connections. Python is used so it is easily extensible, without having to recompile. Eventually it will be dynamic, where new modules can be added to a database, and depending on the userid of a request, a different function will be called. It’s really quite exciting.

I’ve come across a couple of new software programs - one of which is NX (nomachine) Client, which is a remote tunnel for X windowing. I can remote in via this to work from home, as well as ssh or sftp. Which is fairly cool. Speedier than VNC, since I think the local X-Windowing system is responsible for some of the drawing tasks. Feels about the same over ADSL as ARD does over WLAN.

In my “free” time I’ve been doing a couple of other things, both programming tasks. The first is a web application for an art gallery to create HTML and PDF invitations and newsletters. Originally I planned to use a web app so that it could eventually be rolled out as a blog-alike - in fact originally it was just going to be a WordPress installation with some minor modifications. It turned out to be easier to rewrite it from scratch. I have learned from this process that PHP is crap: it’s never clear about the way to do stuff, and many functions have weird names. count_chars, for instance, doesn’t really count the characters, unless you decide that things like #@! aren’t characters. In which case you want strlen. Which had me tricked for some time, since I stopped looking once I had found count_chars. Python and len(anything) is much better.

Speaking of python (again), I’ve also been working on a Regular Expression helper - similar to the one that comes with Komodo IDE. I started (and pretty much finished, in a matter of hours, to the extent it solved my first use problem) this after having to load up Komodo just to get a visual representation of which bits of a text block were being matched by a regex. Still some kinks to work out - I need to figure out how to put stuff into an outline view, so I can see more than just matches, but match groups. Then it will be all good.

In the process of my work job, I downloaded SOAP Client, a freeware tool for testing SOAP packets. It was all good until I tried sending HTTPS requests, which it fails unfathomably on (cannot connect to endpoint…). I emailed the author, and he then promptly released the source code. I’ve snaffled that from Google Code, and I’ll try to hack through it a bit to implement SSL connections. Not sure how to go about it at this stage - dunno if it is with WebKit or something else I need to do. I also plan to add in the ability to edit the SOAP request manually before it is sent off to the server.

I start Uni in a couple of weeks - I’m doing an introductory Java course in intensive mode, which I expect to be fairly easy. I’m really only doing it so I can do the meatier sounding subjects, like Programming Language Concepts and Systems Programming. I really think I’m going to enjoy this course. I will be interested when I come to the Internet Computing subject, since I’ve been doing a fair bit of that in various forms over the past few years. Be interesting to see what the academics think it means.

Well, that’s been my life over the time period since coming back from the beach for a 10 day holiday over New Year. Apart from squeezing in a few games of Touch Football here and there, I’ve pretty much been chained to my laptop.

And loving it.

Using python, it’s easy to get data from IMDb into your iTunes database.

You’ll need a few tools to get this working. appscript, py-IMDb and CocoaDialog. Install each of these, and for the latter, note where you store it. I’m not going to go through the code, as it is fairly well commented. If you can’t get it to work, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help.

IMDB2iTunes.py

Note that you will need to save the file above, and rename it so it has a .py extension.

I love my Mac Mini. It does almost everything I want. With the purchase of a second tuner, EyeTV actually becomes useful. Previously, when I tried to record two programs that adjoined one another, but were on different channels, then you were likely to miss the start of the second program, and/or the end of the first program. Even if you set some padding (I use -5/+15), because there was a single time where the transfer needs to take place, chances are you miss some TV.

So, with two tuners, the system flawlessly records two programs at once. Which means the pre/post padding is respected, as long as there is no clash with other scheduled recordings. It means you then need to edit (or just skip, if you plan on watching only, not keeping), but at least you get all of the material. Oh, and it takes up a bit more disk space.

But the hassle I discovered is that the USB subsystem seems to choke under the load, if you record a program and try to watch another. The picture and sound of the program you are watching becomes jumpy and broken.

I made the program smoother by putting the record buffer into RAM. (And making it much, much smaller).

Note that this is using a USB disk as the recording location, I’m hoping to get much better performance when I move the drive to a Firewire enclosure. However, I can record two programs without jumpiness, so it may be something to do with the Live TV Buffer and how it is handled.

I don’t use live buffering much anyway, so I may just live without.

I’ve consolidated all of my media onto my new Mac Mini, but didn’t really think some things through when I first did it. For instance, I put all of my video data in before transferring my music across. I’ve still kept a copy of my music on the laptop, for what it’s worth, but because I just copied files, then I lost all of my rating data.

I looked at a couple of solutions for transferring the ratings, the most promising was a semi-manual method of creating smart playlists, one for each rating.

That was too old-tech for me, so I came up with a solution that uses Remote Apple Events. Now, to make the code easier, I’m using python and appscript, so make sure you have both of those installed.

    #! /usr/bin/python  
    
    import appscript  
    
    # Set up the two iTunes libraries.  
    local = appscript.app('itunes')  
    
    # You'll need to replace jens.local with your remote machine's name  
    remote = appscript.app(url='eppc://jens.local/itunes')  
    
    local.lib = local.playlists()[0].tracks()  
    remote.lib = remote.playlists()[0].tracks()  
    
    # Create a dictionary with all local track names/artists/albums  
    library = {}  
    
    for each in local.lib:  
        key = each.name()+":"+each.artist()+":"+each.album()  
        library[key] = each  
    
    # Iterate over every remote track.  
    # If it is in the local library, take the local rating and  
    #    apply that to the remote track.  
    for each in remote.lib:  
        key = each.name()+":"+each.artist()+":"+each.album()  
        print key,  
        if library.has_key(key):  
            each.rating.set(library[key].rating())  
            print "rated."  
        else:  
            print "doesn't exist in local library"  

That’s it. I’ve used this to transfer all of my ratings from local to remote iTunes. Granted, there is no check to see if I’ve got all of the local tracks on the remote machine - but that is mainly because I don’t have my Podcast library on the remote machine, and I hope (know?) I have all of the music, and that’s the stuff I care about.

Here’s a screenshot from my remote library.

Short Answer: Very.

Yesterday was the first time I really got to use Vista properly. And the whole OS is crap. Stuff is not consistent across contexts, which means it is really hard to figure out what to do when. Trying to find data is troublesome, trying to find applications is even worse. It is like the whole operating system is conspiring to just leave your data all over the place so you can’t find it when you need it.

So, I had a few jobs to do for my Father-In-Law, after he had bought his new Acer laptop. I should have just refused to provide support since he didn’t buy a Mac, but I’ll let that slide. The things he needed to do were set up his HP printer/fax/scanner, which can be connected to a network wirelessly or via ethernet in addition to being USB connectable; and get his TV tuner card working properly.

The printer turned out to be a bit of an issue - the driver that it came with didn’t work with Vista, so we had to download a 160MB file, which shouldn’t be too much of a concern, but 3’s “7Mb/s” connection is closer to around dialup speeds. And I’m not talking 56k, either. We had to wait over 3 hours for this file to download. After that, it looked to be pretty easy. Except that because the 3 USB thingy was the default network route, I had to disconnect it to then get the PC to even look on the Wireless network (802.11g) to find the printer. After it was connected once it seems to work fine, although just in case I gave the printer a static IP address (or more correctly, a reserved dynamic IP address).

Getting Windows Media Centre to display TV guide data was a bit more hard work. For starters, they have totally fucked up the interface - it is really trying to do too much, and the interface just isn’t logical at all. It is “designed” so it can be used with a remote, apparently, but can still be controlled with a mouse. Except the buttons sometimes act strangely. There is a “back” button, and just next to it is one with the windows logo. But the operation of this button varies according to context. So sometimes that loads the menu up, other times it appears to work similar to the back button. And sometimes the menu that appears takes up the full screen, other times it doesn’t. Fucking crazy. Sometimes you need to double-click on a menu item to activate it, other times a single click does the trick. There are so many options on each of the menu items that you can’t see them all until you scroll through them, but when you hover over one, clicking it doesn’t activate it, it moves it to the active position, where you must click it again to activate it. Which means, using the mouse, you then need to move back and click. And sometimes there is a “more” arrow that appears over the item, and you accidentally click that instead…

If you are using a scroll mouse, things are even worse. If you use the scroller, then it scrolls, but if you then move the mouse even just a little bit, it selects the stuff under the pointer. Meaning it jumps around and makes it very hard to scroll through a large list. Scrolling also sometimes selects items outside of the active widget. For instance, I had the channel list being scanned, and if you scroll with the pointer over this, you can scroll outside of the list, and choose the buttons above and below the list box. But once you are out of it, you can’t just scroll back into the list box. Another trick I use is to scroll hard to the “end” of a list box if I know I need to choose the last item. You can’t do this, as it jumps out of the box. And then can’t get back it. And it resets the list box to display the top items anyway!

So the interface is fairly fucked. The logic of the layout also doesn’t make sense. Why should you go into “Guide” to change the channels. And I’m not talking about which guide is attached to which channel, I’m talking about which channels are active. And attempting to do anything often required going into a menu three layers deep, then going back, then going down through three other menus, and so on. Very frustrating.

The most annoying thing is that it will not use the program guide data that is broadcast with the DVB signal. You have to use an external EPG system in order to see what is on. Every station in Australia broadcasts some guide data, or will in the very near future. I use IceTV with my eyeTV, but I’m hoping at some stage not to have to any longer. $13/month is just crazy. I can buy the newspaper for $2/week with the TV guide in a less useful form. I should be able to access this data for free - it adds value to the TV signal. But Windows Media Centre will not access the broadcast signal at all. Which means if you are away from the internet for any period of time, you might not be able to see what is on TV. I love the internet and all, but having the internet shouldn’t be a requirement to be able to watch TV effectively.

I’m not saying eyeTV is perfect, but it certainly shits all over WMC. Even if it only plays TV programs.