Some python notes on Leopard 10.5

Thanks again to Ian Bicking:

lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library

$ STATIC_DEPS=true easy_install 'lxml>=2.2alpha1'

Truly most appreciated.

A Life Stream

Version II of my life stream effort is acting now as my home page. The first version was using FriendFeed but in this version my server side code is directly requesting the feeds from google, twitter and delicious.

The earlier version used a jsonrpc library but I'm now using web.py to provide the services.

Compiling mod_python on OSX

Source distribution of mod_python (3.3.1) didn't compile on my iMac, but that from the repository did:

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/quetzalcoatl/mod_python/trunk mod_python_src
cd mod_python_src
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-python=/usr/local/Python/Python-2.5.2/bin/python2.5
make
sudo make install

Note that I have built both apache2 and python2.5 from source on my system.

apache, php, postgresql on osx

I've added some scripts to build (cmmi) software on my mac. Although the software is readily available in binary form or using macports I prefer complete control.

Events app

A little app using google data calendar api: http://transitiontownthames.org.nz/events.html. At the moment anyone with a google account can add events and therefore I had to disable the 'edit entry' and 'delete entry' functionality. Need to get my head around the authentication particulary access control. I spent around 30 hours coding the thing (including learning from scratch the necessary apis).

Compiling Python2.5 on Leopard

I had some bother with compiling python2.5 on Leopard. But with the help of Andreas Jung I finally got it to work as I'd like. For what it's worth I've created a shell script for the process. It also includes installing easy_install, lxml and mx packages. (There was a problem with mxExperimental which is fixed with the development snapshot - thanks Marc-Andre.)

First Post

I suppose one has to start somewhere.

I've created a buildout to get started with gdata.py. I needed to hack the gdata.py package setup.py to use setuptools instead of disutils. Maybe later I'll find a different way to install gdata.py into the buildout but for now I've gone with unpacking the tar into my buildout directory and building the package as a develop egg.

I then created a new tfws.gdata package (for want of a better name) to start playing around with the gdata.py api. The tfws namespace is one under which I've been building python packages in the past (almost exclusively unfinished and unreleased zope work). The new tfws.gdata package today contains only a doctest to ensure that the packages have installed correctly by simple imports.

Then, thanks to wu, I found out why my macports installed python2.5 didn't have ssl or indeed readline support.