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For those of you who don't follow our company's blog, Nicolas and myself decided to put an end to OpenHex. See his post for details.

Yesterday I tried to upgrade my "leisure" computer to the beta of Ubuntu Jaunty. Intrepid (8.10) was already disappointing, but this one is so bad I'm considering switching to another distribution. Granted, it's a beta, but I have so many huge issues with it I really doubt they will all (if any) be resolved before the final.

I won't detail the dozen (most of them minor) issues I have, but here are a few chosen problems which I am baffled they passed QA tests.

Evince (and possibly other gnome programs) print out of the page margins. Something like 4cm too high. Lpr work fine though but it's not as practical/user friendly. It's probably an issue with A4 vs US paper sizes, as usual. The difference being that previously it defaulted to US but worked fine if you choose A4. Now it seems to default to A4 but prints wrong. Great.

Skype doesn't work. First I had to remove my .asoundrc file so that it even starts without segfaulting. But then all text of the interface was garbled. A problem with QT and 64bit? Trying Medibuntu's 64bit version didn't help either. What did help is install Medibuntu's static version. But now I have the choice between having sound in the left speaker only if I use the default device, or having both channels but skype using 100% of my CPU while in conversation. Say everything you want (it's non free etc...) but it worked previously, what new feature was worth breaking whatever API is broken now?

And last but not least: you can't quit that flawed OS! Binding together the "switch user" applet with a logout icon was stupid enough (If i wanted both icons next to each other, I could have place the switch user applet next to the logout applet, right?), but now they've gone as far as removing the shutdown, hibernate, suspend and logout options from the System menu (if the applet is present). Since I use the applet, but had hidden those options from the applet (through gconf), I was left with no (clean) way to quit my desktop. It took me a while to figure out what the ---- was happening. What irritates me the most is that the upstream applet is great.

Update: To be fair, I should follow-up and say that on my laptop (that I only upgraded after the dust settled), everything went very smoothly. There are still the Fast User Switch Applet changes that I strongly disagree with, but overall it's been a solid release as far as this particular computer is concerned.

Since I need to develop an application on Oracle, I tried to install Oracle XE on my laptop. Their installation process is quite straightforward, though after you configure it once through their "installer", you can't reconfigure it through it. The installation went smoothly (or so I thought):

Starting Oracle Net Listener...Done
Configuring Database...Done
Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance...Done
Installation Completed Successfully.
To access the Database Home Page go to "http://127.0.0.1:8079/apex"

except that accessing the "database homepage" (a local webserver provided by the database server so that you can easily interact with it) wouldn't work.

After a lot of digging around, I discovered that the "listener" was failing to start (the above message doesn't really look like anything failed), and got at the error message in /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/network/log/listener.log (logging to /var/log would have been far too obvious).

Error listening on: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=IPC)(KEY=EXTPROC_FOR_XE)))
TNS-12555: TNS:permission denied
 TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error
  TNS-00525: Insufficient privilege for operation
   Linux Error: 1: Operation not permitted

And the cause of this failure was that I had already installed oracle XE on this machine a few months ago, and if you uninstall (purge) the package it seems like it leaves some junk in /var/tmp/.oracle

This caused the sEXTPROC_FOR_XE file in that directory (left from my previous installation) to have a bad user/group. Thanks to Oracle for their very clear error messages...

Today, I wanted to improve our blog-title-to-permalink function, so that (French) accentuated characters are not simply stripped but rather converted to their non accentuated version. For example, "é" would be converted to "e".

After some googling and (slightly) tweaking what I found, here is the function I use:

noaccents_table = ''.join(map(chr, range(192))) + \
"AAAAAAACEEEEIIIIDNOOOOOxOUUUUYTsaaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnooooo/ouuuuyty"
def latin1_to_ascii(u_str):
    return u_str.encode('latin1', 'replace').translate(noaccents_table)

As you can see, it takes a unicode string as argument. Here how you use it:

>>> latin1_to_ascii(u'évidemment')
'evidemment'

Note for later: if I ever need to do it in a more generalized way (not only for latin1), the iconv module (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/iconv) might (or might not) be useful.

Today, somebody asked me if Relatorio could generate sheets (aka tabs) dynamically. We had never done so and I did not know if it would work. It turns out it works nicely out of the box. The trick is to create a sheet with a <relatorio://for each="xxx"> link, then the sheet(s) you want repeated, then an empty sheet with only a <relatorio:///for> link.

Unfortunately, the name of the sheets created this way cannot be set dynamically so far. Instead, the first sheet so create will have the name of the repeated sheet and subsequent sheets will be named automatically by OpenOffice: TableXX

If anybody want to try it for himself, I've added a demo of sheet looping to the examples directory of Relatorio...

Here is a post I have started to write a long time ago but always postponed its completion...

Reading Elixir's mailing list and some comments about Elixir on various blogs, I came to realize that many people don't get what the real goal of Elixir is. To be honest, I didn't realize it myself until a couple months ago.

Sure, it abstracts some of the little details, but this has never been a goal in itself and is only a consequence of the goal. The initial goal was only to provide a declarative syntax. This goal is now also filled by the SQLAlchemy built-in declarative extension.

But what differentiate Elixir from declarative is its ability to generate columns (and other structures) and thus save people from repetitive declarations, both by providing built-in constructs for common patterns as well as providing a way to define their own patterns. For example, if you declare a many-to-one relation between a source entity and a target entity, you nearly always want to add a column in the source entity table with a foreign key constraint to the primary key column of the target entity table. When using pure SQLAlchemy, you have to declare the relationship and the column separately as in:

class Address(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'addresses'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    email_address = Column(String, nullable=False)
    user_id = Column(Integer, ForeignKey('users.id'))
    user = relation(User, backref=backref('addresses', order_by=id))

while in Elixir, this is done in one step, as in:

class Address(Entity):
    email_address = Field(String, required=True)
    user = ManyToOne('User')

So, yes, Elixir generates columns for you, but it is not (and never was) meant to hide them from you. It is just meant to save you the trouble to explicitly declare them over and over again. In short, Elixir is a sort of templating system for SQLAlchemy, but to best benefit from Elixir, you should know what it generates for you, and thus you should understand how "raw SQLAlchemy" works.

Ok, now that I said that I hear people coming with the complaint that in our documentation we don't explain clearly nor prominently what gets generated for all constructs. You would be right. I wonder why nobody ever complained about this... For what it's worth, I consider those issues bugs and I am committed to fix them in time. Of course, I would gladly accept patches adding such documentation.

As to better clarify my "vision" of Elixir's future, here are the "abstract" goals I have for Elixir:

• Implement more useful patterns,
• provide ways to customize all the provided patterns the exact way you want them,
• and do not get in the way when you do not want to use them at all.

The only limitation Elixir should add is the inherent declarative limitation, which is that you can't map the same class to different tables/selectables.

Incidentally, these are roughly the release criteria for Elixir 1.0, whenever that will happen.

After being in the pipeline for a while, my article about Elixir was published in the January issue of Python Magazine. To my surprise, it even made the cover. Maybe, the editors meant it as a little present for my birthday (which is today), who knows... ;-)

Within the article, I build a simple collection manager using Elixir, SQLAlchemy, CherryPy and Genshi. This is the first time I write an article for a technical magazine, and I would really love to hear what people think about it.

Update: As I have been given access to the PDF version of the issue, I noticed the "Useful/Related Links" of my article are not the ones I put there (and are completely unrelated -- I wonder where they come from?). For what it's worth here are the links that should have been included:

• Source code for the program built within the article - http://www.openhex.com/products/elixir/pymag
• Data Mapper Pattern - http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/dataMapper.html
• Active Record Pattern - http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html
• REST - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

Now I understand why there was not any hit on the page holding the application source code...

Update: The version they distribute now has been corrected.

Thanks to someone who let us know by email, we just realized the comment form on our blog has been broken for the last 2 months for people who were not using the "follow-up by email" feature. This is fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If programming languages were religions...

• Lisp would be Zen Buddhism - There is no syntax, there is no centralization of dogma, there are no deities to worship. The entire universe is there at your reach - if only you are enlightened enough to grasp it. Some say that it's not a language at all; others say that it's the only language that makes sense.
• Perl would be Voodoo - An incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on friday night.
• Python would be Humanism - It's simple, unrestrictive, and all you need to follow it is common sense.

For the full list, see: http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html

Firefox 3 is great. But there is one minor change which annoyed me: those new arrows next to each folder of the bookmarks toolbar. It takes up a lot of space for nothing, preventing all my folders to appear within the width of my screen. Luckily, there is a way to hide them:

#> cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/DefaultUser/chrome #> cp userChrome-example.css userChrome.css

edit userChrome.css with your favorite text editor:

#> vi userChrome.css

add the following line:

#PersonalToolbar .toolbarbutton-menu-dropmarker { display: none !important; }

(found in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=732134 )