Armin Ronacher

Three days ago George W. Bush visited Austria. Beside the fact that there was a demonstration called stopbush with between 15.000 and 20.000 visitors, which I really found good since I can't stand the politic orientation of the current American president, our government did something really stupid!

When I read about that demonstration in nico's blog I was quite happy about that event. Since the war against Afghanistan I was really unhappy about the American president and his decisions. I was even happier when I read in the same blog about the success of the demonstration (more than 15.000 people participated)

But two hours ago I had to regonice that the Austrian government is exactly the same. Because of the high security level they contacted all doctors and other medical facilities on the route of the American president to get informations about their patients. The same applied for many companies if I can trust heise.

Why the hell can our government can afford that normal working in a city isn't possible just because one f***ing person wants to visit Austria and talk to our president/Kanzler/<insert other person here involved into political decisions>? Many people were upset about the effords and costs caused by the visit of the president in Vienna. Many streets were blocked and the inner city was locked up.

Normally I like living in Austria. But now I feel abashed of our government doing everything what a person from an other country does just because he's the presitent of the united states. And I can live with that if they would protect personal rights.

And now I continue reading.

Nice :-) The new wsgi.org wiki is online. Check it out.

Some minutes ago I read ian bicking's blog where he mentiones that "Stephen Diehl set up wsgi.org as a central location for WSGI-related content."

That's very good since we now have a central wiki where it's possible to collect all available information about WSGI. I hope this will advertise WSGI better - it looks like many people still use CGI/mod_python directly without an WSGI gateway.

btw: I've set up a wiki too for collecting some links and other stuff that look use useful for me

Since I own a nintendo DS I'm really interrested in developing applications for this platform. But where is the community?

Yesterday I finally managed it to run a Hello World script inside of an emulated DS system. That's not that easy. Why? Because wifime which is the only way atm to send software via wireless lan to the Nintendo DS is closed source, requires windows and a RT2500/RT2560 chipset wireless device.

And I don't own a legal windows version, don't want to buy and install one for my notebook, don't want to buy a RT2500/RT2560 chipset wireless device nor do I want to develop using closed source programs/drivers/libs.

Additionally I never had worked with an ARM processor before, and never had developed something with two of them. (And never did something bigger using C as programming language).

The first thing was easy to manage: finding a lib and a compiler for the ds. I found a good page with a quickstart here: double.co.nz/nintendo_ds. But Finding an emulator wasn't that easy. It looks like I'm either too stupid to find linux emulators or the current versions of existing emulators don't support linux. But there was light :) On the German emulator page aep-emu I found a list of emulators. Two of them claim that they support linux. There's nothing mentioned on the webpage but the download link for Desmue on thst page works. And if you have a look in the repository you can find linux sources there too. So an emulator isn't the problem.

After I trued out the ndslib I had to notice that the documentation is nearly useless. There is no tutorial beside the one linked above.

But there is something called palib which looks better. But I havn't tested it by now.

I don't understand that there is something called dslinux, but you need a windows pc to be able to upload games via wifi. All project I've seen use make and other gnu tools but shit a built.bat which looks like this:

make
pause

strange. Isn't there a linux ds developer community?

Today there was a funny discussion on #moin-dev about Hungarian notation. I think it's great fun to read - so here is the chatlog.

Update: Chairos from #pythonpaste gave me a link to a page where Joel explains what Hungarian notation was originally for, and why most people using it are using it wrongly: read article.

Enough ranting. Let's come with usable solutions. I noticed that .net applications seem to use a provider supplied webinterface on public hosts. That sounds like a possible solution.

Jon Rosebaugh told me that he is working on grail, a python project aiming to provide a solution for the python on public hosts problem.

grail description:
PHP has long been a mainstay of web development due to its ease of deployment; mod_php is available on almost any commodity hosting provider, and the end-user can simply ftp up his webapp and get to work. Similarly, in recent months Ruby on Rails has been appearing on more and more commodity hosts. While Python offers considerable advantages over these two languages, it has been hampered by a lack of support from commodity hosting. I intend to take advantage of existing developments in WSGI such as Paste, flup, and various WSGI-compatible-frameworks in order to develop a simple drop-in method for hosting WSGI webapps in commodity hosting.

Sounds nice. On public hosts here in Austria and Germany too you have just ftp access to your server. The common filesystem layout looks usually like that:

/var
 /www
  /a123456
   /htdocs
   /cgi-bin

The ftp user just can access /var/www/a123456/*. So the grail could provide a folder for dropping wsgi applications as valid python packages or eggs in. The webinterface could allow uploading of those eggs and create an entry in a grail.pth.

For example pocoo isn't zipsafe because of its internal plugin structure. Grail would check for the zipsafe flag, notice that the egg isn't safe to execute and unpack it in /var/www/a123456/grail/packages/Pocoo-1.0-py2.5.egg. Additionally it creates an entry in the .pth.

Now it checks for an entrypoint in the egg called webinstaller. That entry point has to point to a function when defined. Grail will call it after installation. It has to return None for doing nothing or a wsgi application. In case of an wsgi application grail will now serve that application at http://example.com/grail/installer/NameOfEgg. Each time grail gets an request for that url it calls the egg entry point and serves the wsgi app. Since you have to authenticate for accessing grail the installer developer doesn't have to bother about user rights.

The next important entrypoint is for static exports. When installing an application you tell grail on which folder you want the app to work in. For example /pocoo. Now pocoo tells grail that it requires some static files in ./static and the export should point to /var/www/a123456/grail/packages/Pocoo-1.0-py2.5.egg/instance/static. Grail provides a middleware that handles static exports on it's own. But additionally it can put those exports into a small apache.conf webservers can import with a apache directive.

Since all wsgi apps would now work in the same process we have one big problem: There not many process safe applications available. That means for example all applications that use threadlocal objects. Process safe are atm only pocoo and moin as far as I have seen. You would only be able to run one django instance on your grail instance. Only one web.py application, only one sqlobject app and so on...