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I have a love/hate rela­tion­ship against the hello mes­sages shown in all the world lan­guages on flickr. That’s why this morn­ing I was talk­ing with a friend on IRC about this and a bad idea jumped in my mind: do an IRC bot that says hello in many lan­guages when some­one joins a channel.

It’s from sev­eral years that I don’t do any­thing IRC related, but this time I had two spe­cial weapons in my back­pack: python and twisted. The final bot is ~90 lines of code, half of the which are for the hello list and the entire coding process took less than 20 minutes.

(Con­tinue reading…)

When I’m work­ing on a project, the only thing I hate more than a seg­fault is to work into a direc­tory where source files are mixed with other files that doesn’t have any­thing to do with the project itself.

These days I gave a look at cmake since I hate auto­tools and I wanted to try some alter­na­tive. It’s nice (apart from its windows-​like names), but it has a little prob­lem: it gen­er­ates a lot of files.

So I googled for some way to clean the direc­tory from its files but I haven’t found none. So I wrote my own simple script that cleans a direc­tory (and its sub­di­rec­tory) from the cmake files. Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/bash

# removes CMake generated files
find . -name 'CMakeCache.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
find . -name 'cmake_install.cmake' -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
find . -name '*.dir' -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -fr
find . -name 'Makefile' -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
find . -name 'CMakeFiles' -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -fr

Pay atten­tion to the fact that you can’t have a direc­tory named *.dir because this script would remove it. Apart from this, it works quite well.

I just done a video of how bcman­ager works. Its devel­op­ment is now stopped from… too much, but I plan to begin once again as soon as I free myself from some urgent stuff. Here is the video:

One fea­ture of django is worth to note is that it sup­ports sig­nals. In fact, under its skin it imple­ments PyDis­patcher, a python library that allows to emit sig­nals and to dis­patch them.

If at first glance this couldn’t look so useful to you, well, this hasn’t been true for me since it was exactly that kind of stuff I was look­ing for. What I was trying to do was to imple­ment some kind of auto-​installer for an appli­ca­tion that I’m writ­ing, and in order to do so I had to run the set up after that the syncdb com­mand is issued. So the main prob­lem was: how do I know when a user does the syncdb in a non-​intrusive way?

After some googling, I found that in django exists the semi-​hidden fea­ture of sig­nals, so I began explor­ing them. The only thing you can look at on the offi­cial site is a page on their wiki, and addi­tion­ally there are some cool arti­cles over the net. Anyway, if you want to know a fast way to catch the syncdb com­mand just follow up the reading.

(Con­tinue reading…)