Roy Tang

All entries tagged python.

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Jan 2020

• Flask vs Django

  24 Jan 2020 12:00am

  

  

  Flask vs Django

  View postClose

  In a bid to reduce the number of webapps actually running on my server (for resource consumption reasons), I decided to migrate a small Flask app I had and merge into this larger Django app where I have a lot of my personal data tracking stuff. The Flask app was small enough, mostly containing backend support for this blog (like search and comment submissions) and some Twitter things. The migration was straightforward, taking around half a day, most of that was wrangling with Twitter API rate limits.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 24 Jan 2020 12:00am #software development #python #flask #django
  Also on: twitter / 0 / 533 words

Aug 2019

• Python: Markov Chains

  28 Aug 2019 12:00am

  Back when I was still learning Python in 2008, one of the first “fun” scripts I wrote was a text generator using Markov chains. I’d run it against all the chat logs I had with people at work and serve the results from a webserver on my computer. THe results were often amusing and sometimes hilarious. Since I’ve been going through my old scripts lately, I thought I’d update that script to Python 3 (read: add parentheses around print params and use pathlib) and run it against all the posts on this here site.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 28 Aug 2019 12:00am #software development #python
  Also on: twitter / 0 / 162 words

• Devnotes: Python Pathlib

  27 Aug 2019 12:00am

  Ever since I started learning Python back in 2008ish, I’ve been using it as my primary scripting language for various tasks such as processing log files, organizing my own file system, processing stuff on this blog, and so on. A lot of it is basically moving files around. In the days of Python 2, that involved a lot of imports of different libraries like os, shutil and glob. It can become a bit messy with so many imports, and I often can’t remember which import I need for a particular case and end up having to search for the documentation (or stackoverflow, let’s not kid ourselves here).

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 27 Aug 2019 12:00am #software development #devnotes #python
  Also on: twitter / 0 / 316 words

Feb 2019

• TriviaStorm: Text and Answer parsing

  3 Feb 2019 5:56am

  A while back I started a Twitter trivia bot as a weekend project. That bot is still up and running on Twitter, you can check it out there! But today, I thought I’d write about the answer-checking mechanism used by the bot. It was a bit interesting to me because it was the first nontrivial use I had for Django’s unit testing framework. I’m not too keen on unit testing web functionality (something I still have to learn), but this seemed an appropriate first use of a unit test framework for several reasons:

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 3 Feb 2019 5:56am #projects #python #triviastorm #testing #Software Development
  Also on: twitter / 0 / 579 words

Oct 2018

• Django Blog Application

  28 Oct 2018 5:02am

  Ten years ago this month, I started studying Django by trying to build my own blog application. I found the code lying around while I was going through some backups lately. It’s way out of date, it uses an early version of django. I thought of bringing it up to speed, but that didn’t seem practical. Instead, for archival purposes, I cleaned it up a bit and uploaded the code to a github repo.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 28 Oct 2018 5:02am #projects #python #royondjango #django #software development
  Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 176 words

Mar 2017

• Running Python 2.x and 3.x on Windows

  2 Mar 2017 1:30am

  I’ve been hesitant to try Python 3.x because it’s not backward compatible with Python 2.x which I’ve been using for scripting since forever. But recently I found out that since Python 3.3, they’ve included a launcher in the Windows version that supports having both versions installed. You can use the launcher to specify the Python version to use at the command line (it defaults to whichever version was installed first):

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 2 Mar 2017 1:30am #python #Software Development
  Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 116 words

Feb 2017

• Weekend Project: Twitter Trivia Bot

  23 Feb 2017 1:30am

  I had been meaning to try writing a Twitter bot for a while now. I figured a trivia bot would be pretty easy to implement, so I spent some time a couple of weekends to rig one together. It’s (mostly) working now, the bot is active as triviastorm on Twitter, with a supporting webapp deployed on https://triviastorm.net/. The bot tweets out a trivia question once every hour. It will then award points to the first five people who gave the correct answer.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 23 Feb 2017 1:30am #projects #python #triviastorm #Software Development
  Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 264 words

Jan 2017

• The Simplest Code That Can Do The Job

  11 Jan 2017 1:30am

  So the other day I was reworking a Python script that I had been using for years on my home PC to manage and categorize some downloaded files for me. This time I wanted to add some smarter behavior to make it more able to figure out when to group files into folders without constantly needing manual intervention from me. To do this, I needed to persist some data between runs – so that the script remembers how it categorized previous files and is able to group similar files together.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 11 Jan 2017 1:30am #python #Software Development
  Also on: tumblr twitter / 0 / 322 words

Aug 2011

• Reply to 'I'll be your python slave. Looking a py project to work at to become better.' on /r/Python:

  Earlier today i was thinking of writing a python script to detect duplicate mp3s, you might want to try that. There are existing programs to do it, but they all seem terrible!

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 27 Aug 2011 12:00am #Python
  Also on: reddit / 0

Oct 2010

• In Python, say I have a string that contains the name of a class function that I know a particular object will have, how can I invoke it?

  That is:

  obj = MyClass() # this class has a method doStuff()
  func = "doStuff"
  # how to call obj.doStuff() using the func variable?

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 17 Oct 2010 3:01am #python #questions #stackoverflow #software development
  Also on: stackexchange / 4
• Reply to 'Python execution speed: laptop vs desktop' on stackoverflow:

  Split your processing into multiple threads. Your particular i7 should be able to support up to 8 threads in parallel.

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 15 Oct 2010 6:27am #python #performance #intel
  Also on: stackexchange / 0

Jul 2010

• Ask HN: How will it impact my webapp if it is written in Python instead of PHP. 6 Jul 2010 12:19pm via delicious

  One of the responses has a nice discussion on the state of python web frameworks.

  Posted by Roy Tang under links at 6 Jul 2010 12:19pm #framework #python #web
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Jun 2010

• Is there any Python library that allows me to parse an HTML document similar to what jQuery does?

  i.e. I’d like to be able to use CSS selector syntax to grab an arbitrary set of nodes from the document, read their content/attributes, etc.

  The only Python HTML parsing lib I’ve used before was BeautifulSoup, and even though it’s fine I keep thinking it would be faster to do my parsing if I had jQuery syntax available. :D

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 16 Jun 2010 7:12am #jquery #python #questions #stackoverflow #software development
  Also on: stackexchange / 3

Jan 2010

• Anyone care to share neat python tricks? : programming 13 Jan 2010 12:46am via delicious

  Posted by Roy Tang under links at 13 Jan 2010 12:46am #programming #python
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• Reply to 'ValueError in Django' on stackoverflow:

  urlpatterns = patterns('',     
      (r'^salaries/employee/$', list_detail.object_list, 'employee_info'),
  )
  

  The third item in the tuple needs to be a dictionary, not a string. Try removing the single quotes around employee_info:

  urlpatterns = patterns('',     
      (r'^salaries/employee/$', list_detail.object_list, employee_info),
  )

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 9 Jan 2010 4:47am #python #django
  Also on: stackexchange / 0

Dec 2009

• Reply to 'How to create a .py file for Google App Engine?' on stackoverflow:

  You will need a better editor than Notepad. With Notepad, use Save As…, and type “helloworld.py” in the dialog, including quotes so that the file extension is .py instead of .txt

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 8 Dec 2009 10:52am #python #google-app-engine #file #makefile
  Also on: stackexchange / 0
• Reply to 'Is there a tuple data structure in Python' on stackoverflow:

  You can have an array of 3-item tuples.

  arr = [ (1,2,3), (4,5,6), (7,8,9)]
  for (k, v, x) in arr:
    # do stuff

  Posted by Roy Tang under notes at 2 Dec 2009 7:37am #python #tuples
  Also on: stackexchange / 0

Sep 2009

• Andy McKay's blog 6 Sep 2009 4:53am via delicious

  Posted by Roy Tang under links at 6 Sep 2009 4:53am #web #django #python #broken-link
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• Django snippets: Facebook shell 6 Sep 2009 4:52am via delicious

  Posted by Roy Tang under links at 6 Sep 2009 4:52am #django #programming #facebook #python #web
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Apr 2009

• Getting Started - wxPyWiki 13 Apr 2009 3:04pm via delicious

  Posted by Roy Tang under links at 13 Apr 2009 3:04pm #programming #python #tutorials
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Feb 2009

• Stylesheet Switcher using Django

  14 Feb 2009 2:17pm

  You may have noticed the new color scheme and new “Theme Switcher” widget in the sidebar. I had done some CSS work during the past month in the office and it made me want to tweak the stylesheets on this site a bit. I figured I might as well make it easy to switch stylesheets, so I wrote a small Theme Switcher django app. (Well, it’s more of a stylesheet switcher I guess)

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 14 Feb 2009 2:17pm #royondjango #django #python #software development
  / 2 / 406 words

Jan 2009

• Using Django Pingback

  4 Jan 2009 7:22am

  I actually had some trouble using django-pingback on my custom blog engine; the django-pingback documentation is mostly fine, but there were some caveats that I had to discover myself through a bit of debugging: The URL specified for the XML-RPC endpoint in the HTML head needs to be a full absolute url including domain, i.e. http://roytang.net/xmlrpc/, which gave me trouble when I was trying to test using localhost pinging to an online server.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 4 Jan 2009 7:22am #royondjango #django #python #software development
  / 0 / 317 words

Dec 2008

• Colophon 2008

  27 Dec 2008 2:08am

  Frontend: All page templates are valid (X)HTML. However, I choose not to claim valid XHTML (and no doc type declaration) since I can’t guarantee that blog posts I write are compliant! The site uses standard CSS and uses the Blueprint CSS Framework for the grid layout of the page. The site design is entirely original (if not simple and bland – I’m not very good with website design yet!). The site has minor usage of JQuery Javascript library in some parts.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 27 Dec 2008 2:08am #royondjango #django #python #software development
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• Fixing up the comments

  1 Dec 2008 4:58am

  I played around with the built-in comments app today, trying to clean it up. Some findings: Some of the moderation views, such as flagging a post or deleting a post, accept a next parameter that determines where the view will redirect to after the operation. However, the way the url’s are set up, there’s no easy way to pass this parameter normally, even through query strings. This lovely bug is documented in http://code.

  read more (438 words)

  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 1 Dec 2008 4:58am #royondjango #django #python #software development
  Also on: blogger / 0 / 438 words

Nov 2008

• Django Update -- WordPress Import and More

  23 Nov 2008 12:04am

  I’ve been busy at work so fell a bit behind with Django. Last night I worked on a WordPress importer, so that I could migrate posts from my current blog(s) into the Django-powered blog that I’m coding. I’m using BeautifulSoup to parse the WordPress export file and insert them as Django objects. Since I was running the script repeatedly, I had to figure out how to easily run it from the command line, without having to run it from inside manage.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 23 Nov 2008 12:04am #royondjango #django #python #wordpress #software development
  Also on: blogger / 0 / 232 words

Oct 2008

• django-tagging

  26 Oct 2008 4:22am

  I wanted to add some basic tagging to my blog app so I tried out django-tagging. Unfortunately, the featured downloads on the Google Code site are quite out-of-date and would not work with Django 1.0, so I did a subversion checkout instead. If you’re getting an error like “ImportError: cannot import name parse_lookup”, then you need to get the source code from SVN. Adding the tagging to the blog was pretty easy:

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 26 Oct 2008 4:22am #royondjango #django #python #software development
  Also on: blogger / 0 / 164 words

• I left it for a while

  24 Oct 2008 6:54am

  … and now it works! http://www.randomencounters.bells-n-whistles.net/blog/ I think the apache service needed to restart mod_python or something… (I don’t have SSH access so… )

  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 24 Oct 2008 6:54am #royondjango #django #python #software development
  Also on: blogger / 0 / 24 words

• Deployment Problems

  21 Oct 2008 6:52am

  So I got a basic blog app up and running. Posting, paged archives, etc. Comments implemented using the django.contrib.comments. No problems here, the only caveat being most of the current documentation found by Google searches refer to the pre-1.0 version. Need to peruse the official docs for 1.0 stuff. RSS feeds implemented using django.contrib.syndication, this one seems fine. I tested it and it’s running fine on localhost. I also have a free django hosting account at http://bells-n-whistles.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 21 Oct 2008 6:52am #royondjango #django #python #software development
  Also on: blogger / 0 / 143 words

• Playing with Generic Views and URLs

  20 Oct 2008 1:44pm

  “when redirecting, how can I make the redirect URL decoupled from the urls.py of the parent app?” -> It turns out that HttpResponseRedirect supports relative paths, so this was fine. return HttpResponseRedirect("../" + str(post.id) + "/") I got the basic posting structure up. /post/new/ -> To make new posts /post// -> To view a single post /post/all/ -> To view all posts I should probably start thinking of a better url scheme.

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 20 Oct 2008 1:44pm #royondjango #django #python #software development
  Also on: blogger / 0 / 167 words

• Starting out

  19 Oct 2008 7:33am

  The quintessential app to learn from is of course a blog. Started using a simple Post model. Added the new post form and view. Can now successfully insert posts into the DB. Next: – create the detail page that will show the post after saving Figure out: – when redirecting, how can I make the redirect URL decoupled from the urls.py of the parent app? i.e. if the parent app has the following mapping:

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  Posted by Roy Tang under post at 19 Oct 2008 7:33am #royondjango #django #python #software development
  Also on: blogger / 1 / 127 words

Jul 2008

• Write Facebook apps using Google AppEngine -- Patrick Crosby 6 Jul 2008 3:21pm via delicious

  Posted by Roy Tang under links at 6 Jul 2008 3:21pm #programming #web #python #googleappengine #facebook #broken-link
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