Fun With Encodings

I don't know if you've ever played with unicode ? Up until recently it was a complete mystery to me. Fortunately I had to learn the basics when coding Jalopy. Jalopy is based on Kupu, which sends and receives all it's data in the 'UTF-8' encoding. I had fun and games with this and basically had to 'unicode-ify' Jalopy throughout.

I've been writing an article for PyZine on CGIs and have revisited the subject. Thankfully my understanding of unicode in Python has crystallised a bit and I think I make sense *grin*.

However, I was flicking through the python docs (the activestate python docs are really nice by the way) and I saw some of the python specific encodings. Did you know there was a zlib encoding ? You can zip and unzip byte strings with single commands......... Phewey.

aString = """a very long string including
          binary data I guess...."""
aZippedString = aString.encode('zip')
theStringAgain = aZippedString.decode('zip')

How easy is that ? There is also a 'uu' encoding that is as easy to use. I'd like to add gzip'ing of data to approx. It's going to be very easy.

Here at the Jesus Centre

Well, it's swings and roundabouts (as they like to say). Here at the Jesus Centre I haven't got Python installed, but I have got FTP access. This is why I built Movable Python. Thankfully firedrop works fine with Movable python. In future I'm likely to be making my blog posts on a Thursday from now on !

But it's Tuesday, not Thursday, I hear you cry :-) I got called in today because of a meeting I found out about yesterday, hurrah. Oh well.

Firedrop Rules

Hans Nowak is adding features to firedrop almost as fast as I can request them. Archives are now ordered to my liking, I can automatically build with the '.shtml' extension, and soon we might see a plugin system that will allow me to build my spell checker. All good news.

I'm even getting to grips with the templating systems. They're very nice, but the lack of documentation and the esoteric error reporting means that firedrop is really only suitable for Python bloggers. Hopefully that will gradually change. When I've finished my next article for PyZine I'll look at doing a simple tutorial on the templating.

Too Many Projects

I guess everyone is in the same boat, but I've just got too much on computing wise. I'm not about to drop anything, but things are going to have to slow down.

• I'm writing an article for PyZine about CGI.
• There are exciting developments with approx
• I'm using PyEnchant to add a plugin spellchecker to firedrop
• Movable Python has had a GUI added by Bruno Thoorens
• Voidspace was over bandwidth this month. I badly need to implement the revamp I've been talking about.

On top of all that, real life is starting to intrude