jessenoller.com

Sausage on the brain.

Mandelbraut: Rendering Sausages.

These are the ideas I get when I'm coding and thinking about food.

Getting Processing into the stdlib

I shot an email out to Python-Dev earlier this week asking for comments/questions regarding my push to get the Processing into the standard library. There's been some decent discussion about target releases and other meta-issues around getting it in.

Right now, it looks like I am going to try to target 2.7 and 3.1 - this makes sense for a few reasons.

• First, the PEP deadline was uh, a year ago for 2.6 and 3.0
• There's some cleanup on the module which needs to be done
• There might be some renaming requirements
• Need to talk to R. about a 1.0 release
• Need to chunk out some time to convert the tests to unit test format.

That all being said - it doesn't look unfeasible to accomplish - and the response both on list and to me privately has been 95% +1 and 5% -.5 and -1 - the positive response really does make me feel that this is the right approach to take.

I am currently working on revised benchmarks for processing vs. threads vs. pp vs. other right now - I'll be publishing those as soon as I complete them to both here and the mailing list discussion as a counterpoint to some of the open questions.

I'd like to see if any of you, oh internet people, have anything else you'd like to have answered for this or anything you'd like to add to the discussion.

Note, I am not trying to solve the "distributed" problem with the inclusion of this - the remote capabilities of the processing module are a side-benefit - not the primary benefit to trying to get this in. I am taking some of the distributed stuff mentally into account - but the goal is to scratch one specific itch - not to solve everyones problem with a single addition.

Now all I have to get over is some bizarre errors with parallel python ramming into ulimit, uh, limits. Luckily I have everything from a dual core to an eight core to hack on!

The damning of the OLPC: Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

Ivan Krstić just posted an entry named "Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi".

Without commenting on the problems of the OLPC project, which - for some time - has seemed to be rapidly pushing itself into oblivion - I completely agree on Ivan's points on open source and frankly, everything else he says.

It's saddening that the project which thrilled me - due to the ideas outline by Ivan - now disgusts me and so many others.

What are your favorite nose plugins? How do you run Nose?

So, I am pondering going all-out with Nose, and I am wondering what plugins people find the most useful for it, and also how people are using it.

I see two aspects of nose/any test execution mechanism: Unit testing "native" (i.e: python code) and running tests that are more functional in nature (i.e: not testing python, but instead testing a web interface).

What are the features of nose you found the most useful?

Too bad I couldn't find a decent nose picking graphic for this one.

Abby is walking!

In addition to the Python sprint day work I am doing (as well as pymag stuff) I've been editing the obligatory "zomg baby is walking" video, which is below.

It's funny - she's been close, and doing short spurts, but last night it was like her walking switch just "came on".

Python 2.6a3 and 3.0a5 released

Barry sent the email out last night that both Python 2.6a3 and 3.0a5 are released - these are the final alphas for both. I'd go and grab em while they're still hot off the presses... Provided you're not already sync'ing from svn/bzr/mercurial/wtf.

• Get 2.6: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6/
• Get 3.0: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/

My Python maxes out my cpus…

... And it's just the unittest I wrote for an application I'm cooking up:

Python is consuming much in the way of processor time. I <3 the processing module. All the workers are doing is tossing integers from one queue to another (in, out, result) and doing random multiplication on those integers.

Delicious.

PEP 370 Per user site-packages directory - accepted.

Guido just shot out email to the dev list(s) announcing he has accepted Christian Helmes' Per user site-packages directory PEP. This is awesome as it will provide a lot of functionality for those of us who don't want to sully the system package tree with modules we install. It could also help simplify things like zc.buildout and virtualenv.py

For giggles, you should read the discussion thread - please ignore my less-than-caffenated contribution to it.

Pep Turds

I've finally been given the "gift of time" to work on the processing module PEP - when I was reviewing the text template, I ran across this:

- Leave the little Emacs turd at the end of this file alone,
including the formfeed character ("^L", or \f).

I should really switch to a turd-friendly editor. I think VIM or Textmate are scatologically disinclined.

Lazyweb question: Python video manipulation libraries?

So here's a question for the lazyweb - I'm looking into doing some command-line/scripted video manipulation and I am looking for pointers to current/well-documented modules/libraries to use.

Specifically - I am looking to be able to stream-edit movies programmatically for a variety of formats (one of which is quicktime for a personal project) - ideally I would be able to load the video file and edit the stream (insert bit from other videos, append videos, etc) inside of Python.

The simplest use-case I can think of is building a montage of various videos, for example - say I downloaded non-flv (or flv formatted) videos of funny-baby scenes from youtube and wanted to chain them together into one big funny-baby montage.

Anyone have any links/pointers - the ones I have glanced at are:

• VideoParser: Mainly just for header information/parsing
• Flashticle: For flash video manipulation - no documentation
• PyMedia: Dated, the last update is from 2006. Does not compile on OS/X

Ideally, the library would allow stream editing/manipulation and be cross-platform. I'm willing to sack the xplatform requirement if the library is really good.