Riklaunim's TechBlog - Python, Django and others

This site contains various notes and pages about programming in Python and PHP, using Linux and more. You will find here also support for my Diamanda Django Applications set with MyghtyBoard Forum and other applications, which are used on my websites, including this one.

Post your Diamanda/MyghtyBoard feature requests :)

I'm remaking the user interface of all Diamanda Apps, including forums (MyghtyBoard), I'm cleaning the code, adding some features but the questions is what people that want to re-use Diamanda components want to have out of the box. For example MyghtyBoard doesn't has/doesn't use user profiles, no avatars etc. Do you want a basic forum, that you can extend as you like, or do you want a fully featured discussion board?

AppEngine everywhere :)

Yes, everyone is talking about it :) It looks cool, but I have to wait in line... But here I have a quote from one of "reviews":

For virtualization reasons only the pure Python is supported and a subset of the Python standard library.

Hm... so I can't have PIL there? If so web based services and tools will get big attention (google charts and not matplotlib, pixenate and others and not PIL).

disk storage is up to 500M, both incoming and outgoing traffic is restricted to 10G per day each, up to 2000 emails per day, and up to 200 million megacycles of CPU per day

All my sites would fit :)

Diamanda 2008.04 Test1 released

I've released a snapshot/beta package of current Diamanda code. This release is designed for (latest) Django-SVN. Bigger changes are: rewritten userpanel (uses Django auth views), migration to newforms in forum (MyghtyBoard) and boxcomments, UI fixes and enchantments. I have some more features on the ToDo list, and I'm planning one or two Test releases before stable one. You can download tar.bz2 from code.google.com, or use SVN:

Reason for OpenID support in core Django

Simon Willison created django-openid package that adds OpenID support in Django. It is nice, and easy to use but today it's broken as it wasn't updated for compatibility with latest python-openid and python-yadis. It's broken and abandoned - see list of issues. django-openid-auth is using this component so it's broken too. django-authopenid works, but it's bit too much if you want to add basic OpenID support. OpenID support affects Django user/auth system so the nicest way would be to have OpenID support in core Django so there wouldn't be any problem with compatibility and integration. Or maybe general way of extending user/auth system?
Edit: There is some development of django-openid in a branch ;)

PIL is great

In my job I got a task to check what can make good thumbnails of big JPEGs in shortest time. As the site is written in PHP I've tested MagicWand and GD plus PIL and EPEG. Making thumbs from few pictures (40MB) took for MagicWand Resize 4,7s, MagicWand Scale 1,77s, GD 0,8s, PIL 0,2s, EPEG 0,15s. EPEG is a e17 library which is designed to make JPEG thumbs but it lacks extra filters (sharpen) so the thumbs aren't top quality. PIL has antialias, sharpen and preserves ratio by default and is faster than GD and imagemagick (convert and MagicWand in PHP) so PIL won.