The recent video I made for Python Fiddle didn’t prove to be a hit with on 60 views so far, but the one for the JavaScript IDE has been on the top or second place in referrals for Fiddle Salad. One explanation would be YouTube’s video ranking algorithm takes into account community factors such as subscribed channels and the videos in your channel.
The number of visitors to my site for Wijmo Books is also disappointing but almost to be expected. At least the site was a lot of fun to build and still looks spiff.

One of the bugs still in the Waterloo Course Planner is the handling of prerequisite sentences that end with “* students only.”. The fix I made was rather simple. Though converting existing test cases to unit tests did not help because none of the older grammar rules were changed and therefore the tests were not broken, it did help in the development of new grammar rules. Python unit tests does a nice job of pinpointing the exact place where the expected results differ from running the code.

“* students only.” appearing in a string results in the tokenizer printing out a list of invalid tokens. There are two ways of ignoring strings in PLY:

1.  t_ignore_ in the tokenizer
2. change t_ignore_ to a token and add a new rule that returns an empty string in the parser

I used the second method this time, since the semicolon preceding “* students only.” would also need to be ignored. Semicolons are treated as a signal for an “and” clause otherwise. The new rule looks like the following:

Installing Gentoo Linux across all Pentium 4 machines for DataMill was an easy process. I copied an existing installation across hard drives. While installing Gentoo on the source machine, I had -march=pentium4 in make.conf while I would recommend i686 or x86_64 for a generic install that can be copied over a large number of machines. I follow the same steps as http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Clone_a_Gentoo_Server_or_Workstation, with slight modifications.

On the source machine, I boot up the System Rescue CD and resize the last partition of the install to fit the hard drive size. I also have netcat compiled and uploaded to my site. I run

to find out its ip address. Before I start the cloning process, I also change the hostname.

On the destination machine, I boot the Gentoo Live CD, download netcat, and listen to port 5000.

Replace the IP address with the one you obtained from the source machine.

I made this video in the summer and Python Fiddle back in 2010. It is still the best Python IDE on the web running in a browser. So here is a demo if you’re new to Python:

First up on the list is the bad news: the old share bar is permanently gone as Google has shut it down. That’s right! Google has shut down a competitor’s service after buying it. At least the meebo team is honest and left us a message:

Meebo was acquired by Google on June 4, 2012.

Our team is now working just a few miles down the road with the Google+ team, where we continue to focus on creating delightful experiences for our users, developers, and publishers.

Meebo’s products are no longer available, but you can find all the latest and greatest things that we’re working on at https://developers.google.com/+/.

Thanks,
The Meebo Team

Elsewhere on the internet, you can find news reports about the shutdown. That gives credence to the “Google is Evil” motto.

On the course explorer side, there has recently been a change to Amazon’s Ecommerce API, breaking code for getting book titles and URLs that I wrote several years ago. Basically, most of the responses returned changed from single item ones to

to multiple item ones

As with many of these bugs, they are easy to fix once cause of the problem is found. If you know XML, an exercise for you is to spot the difference between the top one and the bottom one.

Finally with help and support from my hosting service setting up a newer version of Django to run with a newer version of Python, Building UIs with Wijmo’s official site has been launched. It is just in time for the lucky winners of free copies of the book to join in the party. I spent the last Saturday writing the site and the ideas over the last month just came together.