michael schurter

We use Trac at Lo-Fi Art to manage… well just about everything that doesn’t go in our Google Calendars. We’ve been testing out TracGantt to get some sort of idea what we’re working on at any given date.

We quickly ran into the problem that the summary TracGantt displayed didn’t display 2 pieces of information that were critical for us: the reporter and component. Luckily it wasn’t very hard to hack in a customizable summary display.

You can download either a…

• …patch against TracGantt 0.3.2a
• …or an egg which can be placed in your plugins folder

To change th summary display simply set:

summary_format = $foo: $bar

where $foo and $bar are any keys inside the ticket.values dict. It defaults to:

summary_format = [$component] $reporter: $summary

It appears Will Barton, the creator of TracGnatt, isn’t very interested in maintaining it.

Does anybody else use TracGnatt? Should I offer to become the new maintainer?

Just noticed my first post appeared on Unofficial Planet Python.

Hello all!

If you’re really bored, you can learn more about me or read all of my posts.

Suffice it to say I’m a new Python consultant. Monday, October 15th, was my last day at my old job, and I’m very excited to be starting a new web development company, Lo-Fi Art, with my friend Chris Pitzer! (No links because I’m really not trying to shamelessly advertise, I’m just excited!)

At any rate, thanks to Christian Wyglendowski for introducing me to Python and now getting me on the Unoffical Planet Python!

I come from a PHP (with some .NET) background, so I’m sorry if my posts seem simple or mundane to experienced Pythoners. I can’t help it if the beautiful simplicity of Python is exciting to a PHP/.NET refugee.

Recently I built a small CherryPy application to allow users to upload photos to a gallery. The application is pretty trivial and just uses the Python Imaging Library to resize the photos and Genshi to output some XML which is used by a Flash gallery.

However, after deployment a user complained every 3rd upload would fail. She was using Safari on Mac OSX, and I couldn’t duplicate the error in Firefox. Luckily she didn’t mind switching to Firefox and it fixed her problem:

Working with Firefox has helped tremendously! I’ll only use it from now on, and we should be fine with uploads.

Has anyone else seen this? I deployed CherryPy behind Apache 2.2 using mod_proxy, and Apache logs the following error when an upload fails (IPs changed):

[error] proxy: client 000.000.000.000 given Content-Length did not match number of body bytes read
[error] (70014)End of file found: proxy: pass request body failed to 127.0.0.1:9595 (127.0.0.1) from 00.000.000.001 ()

So it appears Safari just messes up the Content-Length. All CherryPy would receive is a POST with no data.

(Also applies to Ubuntu if you have a SSH server installed.)

sudo apt-get install denyhosts

DenyHosts is a Python application that monitors SSH authentication attempts and block hosts with multiple failures. While its configuration file is easy to figure out, the defaults work well for me.

Every SSH server should be running DenyHosts or a similar security application. Running without it is like running Windows without anti-virus.

How are you supposed to feel when your hosting company gets evicted from their office space?

Ironically just a week or two ago a friend of mine had his shared hosting provider migrate his sites to a new server using 3 week old data. So I guess things could be a lot worse than a silly little eviction.

This is why I keep all of my important sites on a Linode.

I guess my IMAP account is still sitting on DreamHost’s servers, but its been surprisingly stable lately.

I tendered my resignation at Tremont District #702 Schools today.

In 2 weeks I’ll start working full time for the IT consultancy I started with Chris Pitzer, Lo-Fi Art, LLC.* While we mostly specialize in web design and development, I’ll be doing quite a bit of system and network administration at a (different) school at least at first.

Expect lots of posts on this topic in the near future. I haven’t been this excited in a long time, and I’ve never been this excited about work.

So send your RFPs my way! We’d love to help.

* Yeah our own web site isn’t even up yet. But no one pays us to do that.