Richard Jones' Log

I just saw that Sean Riley's new book Game Programming With Python is out. Yes, please :)

Previously I'd only used webunit in unit testing scripts. Recently I wanted to hit Zope's session handling system hard (Anthony had concerns about its stability under load). So I wrote the following:

import sys
from webunit.webunittest import WebFetcher

browser = WebFetcher()
page = browser.get('http://localhost:8080/test/one')
n = int(page.body)
while 1:
    page = page.get('/test/two')
    m = int(page.body)
    assert m == n+1
    n = m
    sys.stdout.write('\r%s'%n);sys.stdout.flush()

Inside Zope, I have two pyscripts: "one" which sets a session value to 1:

SESSION = container.REQUEST.SESSION
SESSION['testing'] = 1
return SESSION['testing']

and "two" which increments the session value and returns it:

SESSION=container.REQUEST.SESSION
SESSION['testing'] = SESSION['testing'] + 1
return SESSION['testing']

Because webunit seamlessly handles cookies, the above test script works as expected. I ran several of the scripts simultaneously, and there were no issues.

Can't think how much pain I'd have to go through to write that test if I didn't have webunit :)

Dinu C. Gherman has released a new version of ReSTedit:

GUI tool for editing and interactivly exploring texts in the ReStructuredText format (or ReST) as defined by the Docutils project.
...
ReSTedit can also export HTML and PDF files (PDF needs a local LaTeX installation).

Very cool. OSX only though, which is a shame. Might delve into the source and see whether a Qt interface would be feasible. When I get a spare moment :)

I finally got my new digital camera. Go have a look at some photos.

The A80 is everything I was looking for in a digital camera - I spent a long time looking around. Before this I've only ever used other people's digital cameras -- oh, and the crappy one. I wanted something relatively cheap (AU$780), have good specs, be a reasonable companion to my SLR and have a good lineage (the A series has been impressing people for some time). And with the baby due any day now, a digital camera's bound to be more convenient than the film SLR.

Sorry, no RSS feed from this weblog until the next Zope 2.7 release. Zope bug "xml mode raises Unauthorized" kinda gets in the way (it all works except for that bit).

(Not that I've been writing much lately though, I suppose...)

I've just spent another three days with Gus demoing our new software to various organisations up the East Coast (here in AU) ... exciting, but exhausting stuff.

I'm really happy with the response we got from everyone we met (universities, traditional publishers, niche publishers, people in school curriculum ...) - including a number of people wanting to run pilots on the first server we set up in a couple of weeks. We'll have a demo server set up too, which people will be able to play with.

Off to give another demo today to another schools body concerned with innovation. Lots of fun :)

Welcome to Richard's shiny new Weblog. It's a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have RSS yet, but that's really just a Zope Page Template away :)

Mechanicalcat.net is now hosted with a local Zope-enabled hosting company, Obsidian. Lots of room for me to generate Zope-enhanced content here. I'll make this weblog software available once I've got an RSS template written. It's a simple standard Zope weblog (not Plone, CMF or one of the other frameworks) with no real frills (just comments and archive, no trackbacks, calendars, etc).