The RSS reader had stored more than 20000 unread posts and/or news when my vacations started. A couple of “Ctrl + A” followed by the same number of “Del” made the count drop bellow 5000… After a while reading the “Selected Ones”, the number of unread is now 1343!
I’ll stop for now… and hope to never reach more than 20000 unread posts again!
You might have already noticed that the number of photos in my own Experiment photoblog. This increase in the number of photos is due to my vacations (sort of!), but also and specially due to the new Python upload “tool”* I’ve developed during the last week!
The all process was quite simple…
1. Design the interface using Glade-3. This step includes creating the window and placing some controls. My “tool” uses labels, text boxes, buttons, menus and even a status bar (which I didn’t get to use for any status display). Also, the required controls should be connected with event listener which will be customized by the developer. The only listeners the “tool” interface defines is the window_kill for the File -> Quit menu option and on_button1_clicked for the ‘Upload’ button.
2. The previous results in the generation of a window.glade file. In order to use this interface definition, the .glade file needs to be converted to a GTK definition file (e.g. window.xml). This conversion is performed using the gtk-builder-convert (simply execute gtk-builder-convert window.glade window.xml).
3. In order to use the Window.xml definition just create a Python class and build the interface in the constructor. Don’t forget to instantiate the handlers you defined for your interface. Here is an example of my gui.py (before customizing the button listener).
Again, I really find easy to make stuff work using Python.
* - The expression tool appears several times between quotes and in italic because the actual application took no more that a couple of hours to build, so calling it a tool is a bit too much. Moreover, it’s highly hardcoded so it’s not much of a tool… it’s more like a “tool”!
Yes, this is YAPP (yet another python post) on my blog… Three in a row! Not that I’m counting…
This time is related to describe some interesting APIs available for python developers. A while ago I was making some experiments in order to develop a simple tool to upload my photos to my Picasa Web Album, and automatically also into my Experiment photoblog. Trying to use Java proved to be a pain in the ass! Now that I discovered Python, I again ready to give it a try.
After a first glance, here’s my findings:
So, I guess all I have to do is develop the GUI. The next move is try to use Glade-3 to do just that!
[UPDATE @ February 15th, 2009]
More interesting APIs available at any python installation near you:
- urllib and urllib2 enable the developer to download almost anything from the web
- urlparse easily decomposes any url
- and, even csv files are easily parsed to be accessed as tables
This is the first message after a brief period of absence. You might be thinking “Why the absence?”. It’s easy to explain… My time for anything else that work is very limited. The current workload is huge, and so the blogging related activities are postponed.
It wasn’t even because I was struck by a lack of ideas… I had several nice ideas for posts, but hadn’t had the time to put any of them down. Even photography has been put aside for a couple of weeks. It’s the first time that any of my cameras don’t shot a single picture for so long.
