grahambinns.com

Hello good travellers. I'm here at the Birmingham Conservatoire, utilising the suprisingly good conference WiFi at PyConUK . Bon.

It's lunch time on day one and my morning agenda so far has covered SQLAlchemy (cool but for me redundant at the moment), Twisted (pretty cool but I need to know more) and PyPy (very cool), the talk about which was presented by Mike Hudson, one of my Canonical colleagues and one of the PyPy developers from back when it was getting funded.

I'm not a huge fan of conferences. For one thing they usually a) necessitate being away from home, b) as a result of a. mean staying in a crummy hotel, c) have crummy wifi at best and d) put me to sleep. So far I'm pleased to say that PyConUK has only fulfilled points a and b, neither of which are their fault.

Incidentally, I've discovered once again that hotel wifi, when not included in the room rate (as it usually is for work) is stupidly expensive. And, again, crummy.

Of course the upshot of wearing the developer pants is that the writer pants are on the hanger and may not get worn this weekend, which is a disappointment for me. I had planned to do some novel-the-second outlining to try and ensure that I keep on track; the story has lost focus a bit in the last chapter and I'm having trouble finding a way to get the protagonist into the next chapter. Maybe that's something to be fixed on the train home.

The other upshot of wearing the developer pants is that I have a huge desire to hack at things. PylibMTP, django_(xml)rpc and grahambinns.com version 0.2 all need work. I just don't quite know where the time's going to come from. Oh, and I have things to do for work, too, which of course have to come first (because, you know, I like to buy food).

I've been saving up a couple of things to post. No, that's a lie. I've been meaning to post about a couple of things but keep finding other things to do. So I'm going to do bullet points instead for the sake of brevity. I might expand upon them later.

• Flickr is playing silly buggers with Violet Blue's photo stream.
  This doesn't affect me much since I use Flickr infrequently at best, but provides yet another example of social networking sites screwing up when it comes to censorship.
  [Edit]: Some people complaied that Violet's site isn't Work Safe. I'm semi sorry for not warning you (be thankful this isn't warrenellis.com).
  
  
• Modern parents are wrapping their kids in cotton wool (figuratively speaking).
  We knew this already, of course, because the world is Much Worse than it was in my day (i.e. around 1991). Strangely, my friends and I managed okay. But the media must be right, mustn't it?
  
  
• The Bible has been attacked as "obscene" in Hong Kong (via Warren Ellis ).
  I'll be honest: this one just amuses me.
  
  
• Wormwood, Gentleman Corpse looks, and is generally, amazing.
  More on this and Sandman and graphic novels in general to come.
  
  
• Cool things are coming for django_xmlrpc, including some excellent work by Reza Mohammadi. Well, I think they're cool anyway.
  
  
• Oh, and I set a date for starting Novel-the-Second. Isn't that exciting?
  

That's it for now. Off to Manchester tomorrow for the cricket. Take care in the meantime. Don't get eaten by anything will you?

B.W. McAdams writes to say:

Just to point out, there's been code on the Django Wiki for nearly a year to do XML-RPC:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/XML-RRC

You're quite right Brendan, there has, and it was this code that originally inspired me to create the django_xmlrpc app that I posted about the other day. Unfortunately I didn't acknowledge this fact at the time, mainly because I was surprised to receive an email from someone wanting to use the code and was rushing to get the Google Code and Launchpad projects for it up-to-date, and for that I apologise (I believe that the code on the Django wiki is in fact yours, so please accept the apology on a personal level, too).

The reason that I created a Django app to for handling of XML-RPC requests even though there was already code available for this purpose, is that I'm a glutton for easy-to-reconfigure code. As such, I added the use of XMLRPC_METHODS for defining XML-RPC-exposed functions.

So thanks, Brendan, for pointing out my omission. If there's anything else you spot that could be changed, don't hesitate to let me know.

(Also, your comment highlighted an issue with my comments-handling system, so thanks for that, too.) 

When I first started thinking about re-writing grahambinns.com in Python using the Django framework, one of the things that I knew I wanted to be able to do was make blog posts (amongst other things) using the MetaWeblog API, which is one of the many zillion XML-RPC blog posting APIs that exist out there in the intartubes.

XML-RPC isn't one of the features that Django supports out-of-the-box for fairly obvious reasons; whilst it's not exactly a niche market it is something that needs to be specifically tailored to the sites that use it, so implementing it would exactly be the first priority for the Django cadre.

Because Python already offers some pretty kick-ass XML-RPC library code in the form of xmlrpclib (Python rocks, by the way), which made it easy to implement a simple XML-RPC server myself, I did. And now you can use it, if you want to.

django_xmlrpc (as I've unimaginatively called it) offers a Django app that allows you to expose your functions through XML-RPC. At present it doesn't support introspection, but that's the next aim for it.

You can find django_xmlrpc, along with instructions about how to use it, at its Google Code site (n.b., I'd like to use Launchpad exclusively for this, but for the time being I'm using Google code until I can get round to setting up a wiki and what have you). If you've got any issues, please report them using either Google Code's bug tracker or (for preference) the project's Launchpad bug tracker.

I'm working on making my MetaWeblog implementation a little more generic; more news on that as and when.