michael schurter

from the I-can-haz-a-search-engine department…

Update: Sorry about the tacky donate link all. I tried to hide it from feed readers with WordPress’s <!–more> feature, but evidently that doesn’t apply to feeds.

When it comes to market share, Google is to Searching as Microsoft is to Operating Systems. Thankfully Google has won their dominant position by creating a really amazing product (you can find plenty of discussions on why Microsoft is on top elsewhere).

Recently Yahoo! opened up their search APIs for anyone to use along with a handy Python library. In a time when Yahoo’s very existence is being threatened, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the search engine that fed me decent results for “free dos games” throughout the mid-90s.

So last night I whipped up a little search engine called Hzzah!*

Features:

• Simple
• No ads, cookies, or even JavaScript (at the moment at least)
• Open Source! BSD to be precise.
• Did I mention simple? That’s really all it has going for it…

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I feel I owe it to my friends who put up with my senseless Python fanboying to admit WordPress is not only a great blog engine, but rocks at updates.

I just upgraded from 2.5 to 2.6 by doing a simple svn switch http://... and then logging into the web admin interface. It took about 30 seconds to complete.

Now compare that to my last experience upgrading Trac from 0.10 to 0.11… ugh.

I love you Trac. Python just lacks an easy and efficient web app deployment method.

For some reason I find this meme interesting… I don’t know why I find it interesting, but at least its brief.

Home Office Computer (Debian Unstable)

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   99	sudo
   80	cd
   59	ssh
   52	vi
   47	ls
   19	cat
   17	ipython2.5
   12	svn
   12	man
    8	host

Server I do most of my work on these days… (Ubuntu 6.10)

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  288	vi
  108	svn
   59	cd
   15	ls
    8	screen
    4	grep
    2	sudo
    2	mv
    2	make
    2	cat

I haven’t seen ipython on anyone else’s yet. I’m constantly hopping in & out of ipython to test things.

On the GUI side of things I use Gnome, Firefox, Epiphany, Gnome-Terminal, Banshee, Pidgin, and NetworkManager every day.

At the CherryPy BOF[1] at Pycon in Chicago we discussed how people are using CherryPy in lots of different ways. We’re afraid people aren’t grokking how flexible CherryPy is just by briefly glancing at the web site and thought having some interesting case studies would be useful.

The wiki has a good start. However, its a bit out of date, and it’d be nice to have some great Case Studies as well as a separate list of Projects using CherryPy.

If your company deploys CherryPy or you’ve used CherryPy for a client, I’d love to hear the story. Here’s a basic format you could follow:

1. Who is using CherryPy: (your name)
2. Where are you using Cherrypy?
   (Company or client name. You can of course remain anonymous)
3. What do you do with CherryPy?
   (What’s your project: a traditional public web site? internal web services?)
4. How is CherryPy deployed?
   (Behind modproxy/modpython/modwsgi, on a cluster behind a load balancer, or is it your frontend HTTP server?)
5. How long have you used CherryPy?
   (The “when” question)
6. Why did you choose CherryPy?
   (While “because its the best” is obviously the answer, a little more detail would be nice. )

Feel free to include screenshots, links, code snippets, diagrams, etc, and e-mail me!

With 3.1 nearing release, it’d be nice if we could launch an updated version of the web site at the same time, so your help is greatly appreciated!

I also posted this over at the cherrypy-user mailing list.

[1]

if excuse not in ['at funeral', 'giving birth', 'saving planet']:
	raise Exception('%s is no reason to miss the CherryPy BOF' % excuse)

If you’re hacking Django and get this…

ImproperlyConfigured: Error while importing URLconf 'proj.app.urls': 'tuple' object is not callable

…you’re probably missing a comma in your URL configuration as Rajesh Dhawan pointed out.

Django pros can move along, I know you never make typos.

Last night Dennis Gilmore, Build Engineer for OLPC, spoke at Bradley University. Since I live 3 blocks from Bradley and have been following OLPC off and on since the beginning, I couldn’t pass this up (even though I was the token old guy in a classroom mostly full of college undergrads).

Dennis had brought 3 XOs with him for the students to play with. He gave a good introductory presentation on OLPC, XO, and Sugar. Not much new for anyone who has been following the project, but I did learn that the XO runs each activity’s process in a different uid/gid. The students asked lots of good questions and were obviously excited about OLPC.

Read on if you care to hear my personal experience with an XO…
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