We are almost a month into the new year, time to look forward.But first a look backwards. The year of 2013 was a year of big development projects and lots of quiet in the main repository in between. Two major updates were released during the year.The first update, the "many sessions per player" update, originated in a feature request that I thought would be easy to implement but which led to far-ranging changes (and honestly, improvements) to how Players and Sessions interconnect. It was a lot more more work than I anticipated.The second update was about moving Evennia's web server from the Portal level into the Server-level. The actual moving of the server was actually considerably easier than I thought it would be. But it turned out that a truckload of other things came along with it. Not only did the cache system have to change in order to accommodate the new webs erver, I had to also finalize the Out-of-band structure, since this made use of the cache system. And while I were at it, other fixes were done and ... the update grew and grew. When it finally merged late last year it closed plenty of issues, but it ...

While Django has support for loading fixtures in its unit testing tools, I have found that maintaining fixtures over time is nothing less than a giant pain in the butt. As your model definitions change over time, remembering to re-run manage.py dumpdata myapp >fixtures.json any time your fixtures are affected is something I guarantee you will forget to do. Not to mention the fact that your database may or may not contain records suitable for testing at any given time. Then all of your unit tests have blown up, it takes you a little bit of time to figure out why, and before you know it you are cursing and out of your flow. For a time I tried using Alex Gaynor's django-fixture-generator but that only solved the problem of creating the records you want to test, not the problem of fixtures sitting on disk that are out of sync with your model schema. After being introduced to Django class-based views' mixin-heavy style, I cooked up a technique for unit test TestCase classes to create the records they need at runtime, thus bypassing the need for fixtures. In an apps tests/__init__.py I create a PopulateDbMixin: class PopulateDbMixin(object): def populate_db(self): """Assume ...

Email validation has always been a bit of a nightmare. On the one hand there are all of the local domain names (sometimes even a single word can be a valid email) meanwhile there is an explosion of top level domain names confusing the entire internet for no reason I've been able to work out.Anyway my problem today is that my payment processor SagePay validates emails and will decline the transaction if the email validation fails. I am using Django's EmailField to valid the addresses but unfortunately SagePay and Django have different views on what is a valid email with SagePay being more strict.In a fit of optimism I emailed SagePay support to try to find out the algorithm, after a brief exchange of mails I got to it as "RFC532n" which completely mystified me (and Google!) However on reading their documentation I got referred to RFC3696 which made more sense although it is one of the RFC's which leaves things quite open with a lot of advice rather than firm rules. So I did a bit of testing to try to reverse engineer their algorithm and it looks like it is the Django algorithm with the addition of a ...

Today the Django project released the first alpha for Django 1.7. As such, the branch for 1.7 has been created in the git repository, and we can start mirroring it. Of course, this is still an alpha and the clone shouldn’t be used yet for prodution. The purpose is to test 1.7 early and to […]

In my previous blog post I covered using awesome-slugify to capture slugs in both ASCII and unicode. Today I'm covering the definition custom language slugify translation functions. Defining Custom Language slugify Translation Functions For those times we need ASCII representation of unicode characters, we can't always use the default unicode-to-ASCII mappings. A powerful feature of awesome-slugify is we can quickly and easily create our own translation functions. Just follow these two steps: Define a translation dictionary. Keys are the names of things you want translated, and the associated values are what the keys are translated into. Generate a translation function using slugify.main.get_slugify(). Explaining this in depth will take paragraphs of text, so I'll just demonstrate it using emoji: # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # test_slugify_emoji.py # The way the awesome-slugify API works, you can't directly import from # the 'slugify' package. You have to import from the 'slugify.main' # module. See https://github.com/dimka665/awesome-slugify/issues/2 from slugify.main import get_slugify import pytest # Step 1: Define the translation dictionary ALT_EMOJI = { u'ʘ‿ʘ': u'smiling', u'ಠ_ಠ': u'disapproval', u'♥‿♥': u'enamored', u'♥': u'love', } # Step 2: Generate a translation function slugify_emoji = get_slugify(pretranslate=ALT_EMOJI) def test_basic_emoji(): # awesome-slugify capitalizes strings. # see https://github.com/dimka665/awesome-slugify/issues/3 assert slugify_emoji(u"ʘ‿ʘ") == u"Smiling" ...

note: The introduction mentions Django and Plone. However, this is not an article about Django or Plone. Introduction Years ago, when I was working with Plone at NASA, one thing I dreaded was when content editors would copy-and-paste from Microsoft Word into the title bar. All kinds of funny characters would appear in the title bar and URL. I would have to go into the database (ZODB) and fix things. Things didn't get better until Reed O'Brien turned on a title validator (probably in Plone.i18n). When we started using Django, one thing that made it nice was the presence of it's slugify() function and template filter. Inspired by the newspaper industry, this function it easier on both content editors and software engineers. In any case, using slugify() we completed a number of projects, with NASA Science being the only public one I worked on. As much as the slugify() function was useful, there were problems. As I discovered time and time again over the years, it didn't handle unicode. Or rather, it handled them by simply vanishing non-ASCII unicode characters. For example: >>> from django.utils.text import slugify >>> slugify(u"straße") # German for road u"strae" If you read German, you'll know ...

We are proud to release: Django-Extensions Version 1.3.3 This brings the usual tons of fixes and improvements Get it now: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-extensions/1.3.3 Changelog: Docs: Made it clearer that Django Extensions requires Django 1.4 or higher Translations: FR Updated Python3: Fix for shell_plus

Years ago, when I was working with Plone at NASA, one thing I dreaded was when content editors would copy-and-paste from Microsoft Word into the title bar. All kinds of funny characters would appear in the title bar and URL. I would have to go into the database (ZODB) and fix things. Things didn't get better until Reed O'Brien turned on a title validator (probably in Plone.i18n). When we started using Django, one thing that made it nice was the presence of it's slugify() function and template filter. Inspired by the newspaper industry, this function it easier on both content editors and software engineers. In any case, using slugify() we completed a number of projects, with NASA Science being the only public one I worked on. As much as the slugify() function was useful, there were problems. As I discovered time and time again over the years, it didn't handle unicode. Or rather, it handled them by simply vanishing non-ASCII unicode characters. For example: >>> from django.utils.text import slugify >>> slugify(u"straße") # German for road u"strae" If you read German, you'll know that the default Django slugify() function is converting the word 'road' to nonsense. For sites dealing with internationalization, ...

ViewSets and Routers are very useful for slimming up your code and providing a lot of default functionality out of the box. They are powerful features in django-rest-framework allowing a lot of flexibility in your code while keeping things clean.Watch Now...

Modern web sites and mobile applications frequently showcase a rich set of images with various sizes and dimensions. Such services can even have their graphics, image resolutions and overall look & feel vary between different devices (desktop, mobile, etc.), and may change dramatically with constant upgrades. One of our key requirements with Cloudinary was to help make image modifications as easy, intuitive and flexible as possible. Using our dynamic URLs, you can indeed resize, crop, alter shape and apply effects using simple URL parameters. New images are transformed on-the-fly in the cloud and the resulting thumbnails are optimized and delivered via a fast CDN. As a result, viewing different derived images of a single hi-res source is a snap. Here's an example of a dynamic image manipulation URL in action: http://.../image/upload/w_100,h_80,c_fill,r_30,e_fill_light/yellow_tulip.jpg You can also use Cloudinary's dynamic URLs to fetch, manipulate and deliver Facebook & Twitter profile pictures, or any image available via a public URL. For example: http://.../demo/image/facebook/w_100,h_80,c_fill,r_30,e_fill_light/madonna.jpg Using dynamic URLs for image manipulations is both powerful and flexible. However, for some use cases, this method may be too permissive. For example, if you add a watermark to an image via a dynamic URL parameter, a viewer may tweak ...

I'm currently working on a site which uses Bootstrap 3, and makes significant use of glyphicons. As of Bootstrap 3, glyphicons are back to being web-font based. They look fine in Chrome (which is my main desktop browser), and in Safari on iOS, but I recently noticed they didn't work on my Android phone. Initially, I thought it might be an Android problem, but then I spotted that they didn't work in desktop Firefox either. Debugging in desktop Firefox is rather easier than its mobile cousin, and loading up the web console, I saw this error: Error: downloadable font: download failed (font-family: ...): bad URI or cross-site access not allowed Some Googling around got me to this Stack Overflow question, which told me I needed to add Access-Control-Allow-Origin * to the headers returned in the HTTP responses for the font files. The answer was for Apache, where I was using nginx, for which the relevant snippet is: location ~* \.(eot|ttf|woff)$ { add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *; } I just added that to the location block that was responsible for serving my font files, reloaded nginx, and the icons appear correctly. Here's hoping this post helps someone else figure out how to get ...

推荐一篇Django的开发及部署的文章：Django Best Practices－－A guide to d […]

In my previous blog post I covered test discovery and writing basic tests using pytest. Today I'm going to cover a few more features that I really enjoy: raises and fixtures. The Intuitively Named raises context manager When using pytest, you can assert whether or not an exception occurred via the following: # test_exceptions.py from pytest import raises def test_an_exception(): with raises(IndexError): # Indexing the 30th item in a 3 item list [5, 10, 15][30] Fixtures as Function Arguments When writing tests, it's not uncommon to need common objects used between tests. However, if you have a complicated process to generate these common objects, then you have to write tests for your tests. When using Python's venerable unittest framework, this always causes a spaghetti-code headache. However, via the virtue of simplicity, pytest helps keep our test code cleaner and more maintainable. Rather than try and explain that further, I'll write some code to get my point across: # test_fixtures.py from pytest import fixture @fixture # Registering this function as a fixture. def complex_data(): # Creating test data entirely in this function to isolate it # from the rest of this module. class DataTypes(object): string = str list = list return ...

When I first encountered Holger Krekel's pytest this summer on Jeff Knupp's blog I felt like I had been living under a rock for years. I've been using Python's unittest framework since 2006 and nose to find tests since 2008, but here was another test framework dating back to at least January 24, 2007. pytest is a very mature testing tool for testing Python. My favorite features: It can run unittest, doctest, and nose, style tests suites, making it ideal for new and legacy projects. It includes an intuitively named raises context manager for testing exceptions. You can define fixture arguments to generate baseline data. This is very, very different from Django-style fixtures. Via pytest.ini you can change the behavior of pytest. Integrates nicely with setup.py. Alright, lets dive into usage. Test Discovery The first thing that pytest provides is test discovery. Like nose, starting from the directory where it is run, it will find any Python module prefixed with test_ and will attempt to run any defined unittest or function prefixed with test_. pytest explores properly defined Python packages, searching recursively through directories that include __init.py__ modules. Since an image is probably easier to read, here's a sample directory ...

Recently we wanted a way to let users create real-life events which could occur in any time zone that the user desired. By default, Django interprets any date/time that the user enters as being in the user’s time zone, but it never displays that time zone, and it converts the time zone to UTC before storing it, so there is no record of what time zone the user initially chose. This is fine for most purposes, but if you want to specifically give the user the ability to choose different time zones for different events, this won’t work. One idea I had was to create a custom model field type. It would store both the date/time (in UTC) and the preferred time zone in the database, and provide a form field and some kind of compound widget to let the user set and see the date/time with its proper time zone. We ended up with a simpler solution. It hinged on considering the time zone separately from a time. In our case, we would set a time zone for an event. Any date/time fields in that event form would then be interpreted to be in that time zone. Now, displaying ...

We are proud to release: Django-Extensions Version 1.3.0 This brings official Django 1.6 support and the usual tons of fixes and improvements Get it now: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-extensions/1.3.0 Changelog: Feature: SQLDiff much better notnull detection Feature: reset_db add option to explicit set the PostGreSQL owner of the newly created DB Feature: shell_plus added support for MongoEngine Feature: sync_s3 enable syncing to other cloud providers compatible with s3 Improvement: ForeignKeyAutocompleteAdmin add option to limit queryset Bugfix: graph_models fix issue with models without primary key Bugfix: graph_models fix UnicodeDecodeError using --verbose-names Bugfix: dumpscript fix problems with date/datetimes by saving them now as ISO8601 Docs: many improvements Docs: Chinese translation !!! Python3: various improvements Tests: add Django 1.6

Learn how to use basic authentication with your new API, and setup custom permissions to get fine grained precision of what can be done with data.Watch Now...

Making News Year's Resolutions is something I do every year. It's important to me. I like to set goals and see how well I do. Resolutions Write and publish fiction. This is a childhood dream that I would like to do. Write and publish as least one new technical book, preferably on Python. Release the second edition of Two Scoops of Django. Learn Haskell or some other interesting programming language. Figure out a way I can make money working in open source efforts. As a consultant, this explains why I don't do it more. Visit the three continents I've yet to see. That means South America, Africa, and Antarctica. Visit at least one new nation. It's hard to come up with preferences since the whole world is so exciting. Take road trips around the USA. See the Grand Canyon. Visit more family. Do 1000 push-ups or similar exercises in a single day. I'm at 300 now. Pull off an Aú sem Mão (no-handed cartwheel). Blog once a week. That is at least 52 blog entries! Take a fun class with Audrey. Upload all my outstanding pictures to Flickr! Learn how to surf or snowboard. See all my friends. All of ...

Inspired by Alex Clark's meme, here is my own entry into this end-of-year fun. What’s the Coolest Thing You Discovered This Year? Alex had his own focused on Python applications, frameworks, and libraries. Me, I'm going for a more general approach. This year I discovered: LaTeX That book I co-wrote with Audrey Roy? Written in LaTeX. It wasn't easy to get started, even with Audrey as my instructor, but now that I grok it, I feel extremely empowered. That's because I can do all kinds of awesome, insane hacks when Sphinx generates PDFs. I hope I get the chance to show off some of my new madness to the world in 2014. How to Tie A Bow Tie If you are going to be formal, the bow tie adds an enormous amount of class. However, clip-ons are considered tacky, especially as it's considered stylish to loosen the bow tie later in the evening to demonstrate you aren't wearing that clip. Of all the stuff I watched on the subject of bow tying, this video was the longest and the best of them all. Awesome Foods Around the World Here's the short-list: Oscypek is a Polish smoked, salted cheese that should ...

Chartkick is an application, a library for making JavaScript based charts. There is JavaScript library, Ruby wrapper and Python wrapper for Django and Flask. Let see what Chartkick can offer us in Django applications.

In this post I will explain yet another simple number theoretic function, called the Euler Totient Function. This is a simple function which is used indirectly in many problems in programming contests. The function is denoted as phi(n). phi(n) basically gives the number of integers greater than 1 and lesser than n which are co-prime to the integer n. In other words, it is the cardinality of the set S = { a: 1<a<n , gcd(a,n) = 1 }. To calculate this function, we will use a straight forward brute force approach. With a simple analysis, we can show that the running time of this algorithm is O(sqrt(n)). - Start with an estimate of the totient function as n - Iterate for i from 2 to sqrt(n) - If i | n , we know that all factors of i less than equal to n will have gcd with n as atleast i. Hence, they can never be in the set S. Hence remove them from the result. - While i|n, divide n by i. - After the iteration of i from 2 to sqrt(n), if n is a number greater than 1, remove all its multiples less than n ...

Recently, I ran across an issue executing syncdb on an empty database with both Django-CMS 3 and the debug toolbar listed in the installed apps: $ python manage.py syncdb --all DatabaseError: relation "cms_title" does not exist LINE 1: ..."django_site"."domain", "django_site"."name" FROM "cms_title... ^ After some digging around with --traceback I discovered that this was caused by the debug toolbar (using the quick setup) patching the URL config when its models.py is loaded, which in turn triggers the plugin discovery to misbehave. To get around this, follow the explicit setup as described in the toolbar's documentation which requires that you disable the automatic patching, add a URL pattern manually to your project's urlpatterns and the debug toolbar's middleware. "Django-CMS and Debug Toolbar and syncdb" was written by Horst Gutmann and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria License.

There are times, when you need to export the data from your database to different formats. For example, you want to create some diagrams in Office program for a presentation. In this post I will show you how to create admin actions which export selected items as files for a spreadsheet application (like MS Excel, OpenOffice Calc, LibreOffice Calc, Gnumeric, or Numbers). I will cover the mostly used formats: Comma Separated Values (CSV), Binary Excel (XLS), and Office Open XML (XLSX). First of all, have a look at the model we will be dealing with. It's a simple model with title, description, and - of course - the id. # models.pyfrom django.db import modelsclass MyModel(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=100) description = models.TextField(blank=True) In the admininstration options, we'll define three admin actions: export_csv, export_xls, and export_xlsx. # admin.pyfrom django.contrib import adminfrom models import MyModel# ... export functions will go here ...class MyModelAdmin(admin.Admin): actions = [export_csv, export_xls, export_xlsx]admin.site.register(MyModel, MyModelAdmin) Now let's create functions for each of those actions! Comma-Separated Values Format CSV is the most common import and export format for spreadsheets and databases. It's a textual format which one could easily create or parse himself, but there is also a python built-in ...

The Imaginariy Realities webzine was the place to go to for MUD game design articles in the late 90's. Last released in 2001, its articles are still worth the read for any game designers today. But guess what - this venerable ezine has now returned! You can find the new issue here.I think this is a good community initiative worthy of support. I contibuted two articles myself (one of which is about Evennia) and would like to thank the staff/editors who took their work very seriously and did sterling work on getting everything in shape.Thanks also to the other authors who penned some very interesting articles. Great job guys!My impressions:  KaVir elaborates in A modern interface for a modern MUD on the advantages of not sticking with an outdated UI just for the sake of it. Adding a more accessible presentation is not that hard and won't ruin your game but rather help it. Whereas I have read his argument about this before, this is a good summary to take to heart. Evennia's javascript web client is currently mainly a telnet clone; there's a lot of things we could offer to make it easier for users to offer a more graphical ...