Where there is a Will

When I'm debugging Python I tend to sprinkle my code liberally with print statements. Trouble is, I forget which files I added those print statements to and have to waste a few minutes tracking them down. Time which could be better spent doing pretty much anything else.

Not sure why I didn't think of this before, but I hacked together something that automatically prints the file and line of the print statement next to the output.

Here's the code:

To use it, save it as ‘debugprint.py’ then imported it somewhere. That's all you need to do. Works on Python 2.7 and probably other 2.X Pythons.

Here's what happens if you do it from the console:

For print statements in your app, you will get something like:

Ben Timby has committed code to PyFilesystem that lets you expose any filesystem over FTP. We've had the ability to serve filesystems over SFTP (secure ftp) and XMLRPC for a while, but plain old FTP was a glaring omission–until now.

You can serve the current directory programatically with something like the following:

The same functionality is also available to the fsserve command. The following is equivalent to the above code, but from the command line:

You'll probably need root privileges (i.e. sudo) on Linux for these examples.

With the server running, you can browse the files on your home directory with an ftp client, or by typing “ftp://127.0.0.1” in to your browser. Any of the other supported filesystems can be served in the same way. continue reading…

I made currency site available for testing today. See my previous post for the back-story, but in essence currency site is a virtual currency platform.

I sometimes object to the word virtual in ‘virtual currency’. Most of the money I possess is not in any physical form; it's merely a number stored in a database somewhere – and transactions occur without any kind of physical objects changing hands. So the word ‘virtual’ seems entirely redundant, since there's is no qualitative difference between virtual and ‘real’ money I can see. The only difference is the level of trust in the system. continue reading…

Net Communities are looking for a Python/Django developer to work on an in-house project. It's a contract that would require some on-site work, but they would also consider a full-time developer for the right individual.

If you are interested, get in touch with Andy Evans.

If you are writing an application of any size, it will most likely require a number of files to run – files which could be stored in a variety of possible locations. Furthermore, you will probably want to be able to change the location of those files when debugging and testing. You may even want to store those files somewhere other than the user's hard drive.

Any engineer worth his salt will recognise that the file locations should be stored in some kind of configuration file and the code to read the files in question should be factored out so that it isn't just scattered at points where data is read or written. In this post I'll present a way of doing just that by creating a virtual filesystem with PyFilesystem.

You'll need the most recent version of PyFilesystem from SVN to run this code. continue reading…

I recently decided to look into working with the Canvas element to prototype a game idea I had. Since the easiest way to learn a technology is to use it, I set myself the goal of implementing the Ken Burns Effect.

There are a few JS slideshow scripts that do the Ken Burns effect, but I haven't seen any implemented in Canvas.

Without further ado, here is my implementation of the effect:

Your browser doesn't support canvas! Try Chrome, Firefox or Opera

If you see the effect, above, you are probably viewing this in one of the good browsers. I think it can be made to run on IE with excanvas, although I have yet to test that. continue reading…

Locidesktop was my coffee shop coding project of last year. I was quite pleased with the results. Locidesktop.com has been happily serving link desktops to some loyal visitors for months now – with no maintenance required on my part (a good thing because I've been busy with other projects). continue reading…