Staz's blog

Inspired by my friend Bram's script Mobify which convert a webpage to a Kindle Ebook, I decided to made my own version in Python.

I used to keep a ton of open tabs in Firefox as a list of articles to read later. This script allowed me to transform all of them into kindle ebooks and read them later at my ease in public transportation, instead of always keeping them around and never getting the time to read them. As a result I got a lot more reading done.

The general mechanism of this script is to download the page and all its affiliated images, pass it to decruft (a python implementation of the readability algorithm to extract the content of a webpage) and convert it with kindlegen. The nicest improvement over Bram's script is that it doesn't create any files in the current directory but instead write everything in the /tmp directory and move the generated book in a common directory. It also automatically determine the name of the file.

The source code is available on GitHub

FrontEndAdmin is a nice Django application allowing you to easily edit/create/delete object directly from your site. By the inclusion of a simple tag into your template, you can bring the power of the admin interface directly into your website. It works pretty well once you have merged some patches

FlatBlocks is similar to FlatPages as it allow to have block of HTML as Django Objects, but works as blocks embeddable in your template instead of complete page.

Here is how to allow editing FlatBlocks directly in your pages [2]. I will commence with the two wrong ways I first did.

The wrong (ie non working) way

Using in your templates :

And getting the error :

'myblock' argument must be a model-instance

This doesn't work since myblock is juste a slug name and not a object in your context and FrontEndAdmin need that.

The Bad Way

Dive into FrontEndAdmin code for a few hours. Patch it to add a template tag allowing the edition of any objects.

Working but kind of hacky and now you have to maintain a patch. You also have to add the tag for every block you have in your website.

The Good Way

Copy the flatblock templates' directory in your project's templates dir, Edit the flatblock.html file and add:

And that's it. Simple and now all your flatblocks become editable (you can use a separate template if you want some non-editable blocks)

Footnotes :

[1] There are a lot of variations of django-flatblocks, to names a few : django-chunks, django-better-chunks, django-generic-flatblocks, etc... this technique probably works with most of them.

[2] FlatBocks offer some feature to edit blocks in your pages but it require more works than FrontEndAdmin and since I already use FrontEndAdmin for everything else, I prefer to remain consistent

Summary : How to get a nice green/red bar for you python unit tests in vim

Recently I have started following my friend Bram advice to do units testing for my python programming. Obviously, I soon wanted to have those unit tests run into vim and get that nice bar that go green or red depending if the code pass or not, the one you see in the nice Gary Bernhardt's screencasts.

Fortunately ReinH made the work easier by already extracting the code to make the red/green bar in a plugin called vim-makegreen (originally RubyRedGreen as it was for ruby)

Here is how I made it works with my python's unit tests, note that I'm using the standard python unit test module but that it work with nose-type tests too.

Pre-requisites

You will need to install nose, a unit testing framework for Python which more importantly provide a nosetests command that detect all the tests in the current directory and run them, this avoid having us create our own python script to do the testing as Tip 280 suggests.

On debian based system it's a simple matter of apt-get install python-nose or you can use easy_install nose

Note that if you don't want to install nose you can still use the Tip 280 way and modify the makeprg option

PyFlakes interference

I use pyflakes-vim to automatically check my python code constantly, if you don't do it too you should it's awesome and make you gain a lot of time. Unfortunately this plugin use the quickfix list too and so always hide the errors list from the unit test which is quite annoying (and it took me a lot of time to find out was wrong with my quickfix).

Fortunately the release tarball provide a patch to disable the quickfix integration, which you can apply with patch -p1 -R <quickfix.diff - just ignore the error about the readme.rst.

The proper way to fix this in the future would be to have an option to disable populating the quickfix, see Issue 13 of pyflakes-vim

Update : This have been fixed in upstream pyflakes-vim, now you just need to put let g:pyflakes_use_quickfix = 0 in your .vimrc

Compiler file

We are going to handle nosetests in Vim as if it was a compiler since Vim integrate them well. For that we need a 'compiler file' which tell Vim what program to run and hot to parse it's output to detect errors.

I made one for nosetests, based on the pyunit one and which you can download here and install by copying the nose.vim file in '.vim/compiler'

Inside Vim use :compiler nose to select it then running :make will run all the tests nosetests find in the current directory and jump you to the first error.

There is also a git repository for the compiler file.

Vim-makegreen

The last piece to install is vim-makegreen. You will need the latest git version as it contain my patch to make it works with nosetests. Download it in zip format or retrieve it via git and install it like any other vim plugin.

If you now press \t (or rather <Leader>t) all your tests will be run and a red or green bar will be displayed depending if they fail. (Don't forget to set :compiler)

Automatically set nose as compiler (Optional)

If you don't want to set the :compiler every-time you edit a file you can have it set automatically for all python file by adding the following line to your .vimrc :

 autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.py compiler nose

Mini quickfix primer (Appendix)

Since this use quickfix you can use the regular quickfix commands, here are the most useful ones:

• :cl display the list of error
• :cn jump to the next error
• :cp jump to the previous error
• :copen open a buffer with the list of error
• :cw close it

See also the :help quickfix for more information on it.

Mendatory screenshot:

Hello,

Telepathy-butterfly 0.5.5 has just been released, along with telepathy-python 0.15.16 and papyon 0.4.5.

Butterfly is the MSN connection manager, the "back-end" for MSN, for the Telepathy IM and VoIP framework. Telepathy python is a convenience module to use telepathy and papyon is a python MSN library.

Sadly in this release we had to disable the Audio/Video calls which were broken since Microsoft removed the necessary servers. For more informations on the subject I invite you to read Kakaroto's post

On the good news this release should resolve the issues with the lost messages thanks to William Grant excellent investigation of the issue and it should also fix some other annoying bugs.

This new papyon release don't display the password in the logs any more so I recommend using this version if you want to submit bug reports.

Hopefully the next butterfly release will bring you the long awaited File Transfer support. We will also have proper multi-user chat thanks to Jonny Lamb implementing the conference interface.