njr 3.0

George Bauer (who’s been really helpful, thanks!) explained briefly how to use PyDS’s PictureTool in a comment:

Of course PyDS has a PictureTool. You need to enter a path on your disc in the Pictures preferences and then can upload pictures from there. To upload a picture go to the pictures upload area and enter title and description for those pictures you want to upload. After uploading, you can refer to them with \$pictures.imageTag(picid, (sizex, sizey)). Set picid to the numerical id of your picture and sizex,sizey to the boundingbox the resized picture should fit in (resizing honours aspect ratio, so you picture might actually be smaller than your boundinbox).

It seems that the PictureTool is optimized for posting pictures, not screen images; PyDS provides a nice album-style overview page. This is good, and something Radio didn’t even attempt to do, but all I really want is a single image uploaded. The interface looks like this:

I have no idea what the various text fields represent, and I get a Python exception when I try to submit a fully populated form. If I remove entries 2 and 5, nothing seems to happen. Time to dig into the source code.

Turns out QuickTime 6.4 (and earlier?) incorrectly output PNG tEXt chunks including a trailing null, and PIL chokes on them. PyDS discards the error, and behaves strangely.

That fixed, my next problem: still not getting any thumbnails. pyds-start -f will run PyDS in the foreground.

error: Server Error: exceptions.IOError,
encoder jpeg not available:
file: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/
Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/
PIL/Image.py line: 325

After rebuilding PIL, I ran into another problem with PyDS: once it attempted to create a thumbnail and failed, it’d write a zero-length file and give up. Fixing that, I finally had thumbnails.

3:00 PM | PyCS
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My life hasn't entirely settled down yet, but I have really missed being able to write down whatever is on my mind.

I have a new weblog, created with PyCS and PyDS. I'll miss a lot about Radio, but not its instability, CPU usage or bugginess.

Posts from this weblog will migrate to the new one at some point. For the moment, this page will remain. If you're accessing the RSS feed from sabi.net, it should automatically redirect; if not, the new feed is here.

12:31 PM | Radio
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After all that template work, I don’t have any time to write a real blog entry. I’ve accumulated quite a number of “this is dumb” screen shots over the past few months. I’ll try to post one a day for a while. Here’s one:

PyDS has nothing like Radio’s MyPictures tool, which means I’m back to the old method. I should write a quick script using PIL to generate an IMG tag and upload an image for me.

9:44 PM | PyCS
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I’m going for a much more minimalist look with this weblog compared with my last one, hopefully CSS-only. So far there’s a lot of gray and blue. Some of the template changes aren’t taking effect so I’m posting this as a test, hopefully there’s something I forgot to rerender.

*sigh* This doesn’t seem to post properly…

Ahh, I see, if the template is broken, PyDS doesn’t say anything, it simply doesn’t render. Also, much like Radio, you start a render and just wait an indeterminate amount of time before you have any idea what happened. I wish it were possible to just say “rerender THIS page” because it’s the one I’m staring at as I’m going through 8000 design iterations. Or to have the /preview/ URLs simply do no cached rendering at all, would be much better. (That’s what Radio does.)

7:13 PM | PyCS
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Georg Bauer posted some clarification of PyDS’s use of asynchrony and threading.

I wish I could find a picture of me in the first grade programming our Apple IIe, on the top floor of our condo in Durham. Better yet, I’d like to see some of the Applesoft programs I wrote back then.

Looking for old pictures of my work environment, the earliest I could find was this one:

It shows a portion of my cube at Invantage’s third office space, at 149 Sidney St., Cambridge, MA, in late 1997. That’s my old PowerBook 540 (soon to be replaced by a Wall Street) and new Newton 2100 ($1000… sigh.) The Newton woke me up this morning.

10:46 AM | PyCS
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