We were using pyjavaproperties at work, but ran into a few limitations. One of our developers had patched it to be able to read from a StringIO object instead of a file object. I had also encountered an issue where it has extended the standard property parsing to interpolate patterns like {var} to expand the value of var as a reference to another property. This interfered with some of our properties files that use ${var} as a pattern recognized by our configuration system.

Since pyjavaproperties was also missing some other features like unicode support I decided to go ahead and read over the the Java documentation of the file format and build a new cleanroom implementation. I have a decent set of unit tests and I think this implementation should cover all of the features documented in the spec. It has full support for reading and writing unicode values, though it it will return Python str objects by default when your key or value contains only ASCII. This was more convenient, but I may revisit that to always return unicode or have a switch for that behavior.

So, if you need to work with Java .properties files from Python, just pip install jprops and check out the docs. If it’s missing something let me know.

Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

After a few years of mostly server-side development I’m getting back into JavaScript, and for the first time I feel like I’m approaching it as an actual engineering challenge rather than a bunch of quick hacks. As our JS code base is growing I’m breaking things up into namespaces to keep things manageable.

Though JavaScript has no built-in notion of “modules” like many other languages you can use objects to create namespaces, which in their simplest form would look something like:

1
2
3
4
5
6

util = {
  my_func: function() {
    alert('my_func');
  }
};
util.my_func();

However, creating nested namespaces like “myapp.util.text” gets a bit ugly with that approach. I liked the basic API of Namespace.js, though I didn’t want any of the additional features like remote loading, so I figured I could make something much simpler and smaller.

You can first “declare” a namespace and then assign attributes like:

1
2
3
4

Namespace('myapp.ui');
myapp.ui.ToggleButton = function() {
  // ...
};

Or pass in the attributes to include in that namespace:

1
2
3
4

Namespace('myapp.util.text', {
  some_func: function() {
  }
});

Here’s the code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

function Namespace(name, attributes) {
  var parts = name.split('.'),
      ns = window,
      i = 0;
  // find the deepest part of the namespace
  // that is already defined
  for(; i < parts.length && parts[i] in ns; i++)
    ns = ns[parts[i]];
  // initialize any remaining parts of the namespace
  for(; i < parts.length; i++)
    ns = ns[parts[i]] = {};
  // copy the attributes into the namespace
  for (var attr in attributes)
    ns[attr] = attributes[attr];
}

This is of course much smaller than the 16kb of Namespace.js, so as an additional challenge I decided see if I could compact it to fit the 140 character limit of a Twitter status message :) (Note: the Twitter version used jQuery’s $.extend function to copy the attributes into the namespace which I later replaced with the framework-independent version above.)

I’ll follow up later with some tricks I’ve been thinking about to “import” stuff from other namespaces.

However, this product was created by another industrial design company that has a lot of extremely creative products, such as this phone with rotation aware clock display:

Unfortunately many of their products are only produced in small runs, so availability is limited. However, it’s worth browsing their industrial design catalog to see some of the cool ideas.

One of my first major annoyances was that some form controls weren’t keyboard navigable. Filling out web forms was frustrating since hitting Tab would skip past drop-down fields, and when dialogs popped up and I didn’t want to respond with the default button I had to switch over to the mouse instead of just tabbing to the right one.

Fortunately I found these instructions on changing this behavior. Now I can use the keyboard to quickly navigate these inputs.

More on my Mac switch to come.

• HTML slides
• reStructuredText source
• rst2s5 modified for code coloring

The modified rst2s5 script requires Pygments for coloring the example code.

P.S. see the page that started it all

Download: ~ germanium_0.2.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb

Download: ~ emusic-gnome-0.2.0.tar.gz

Darcs:

darcs get --tag=0.2.0 http://projects.matt-good.net/darcs/emusic-gnome/

The Daily Show has quite often ridiculed the rediculous topics covered by “real” new programs such as those on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. These shows are no less padded with “entertainment” than The Daily Show, though they lack the witty satire offered by Jon Stewart and his team of writers.

So, don’t feel guilty about relying on The Daily Show to stay informed. You not only get a good source of news, but some good laughs as well.

Read the press release from Indiana University

So, the other day at the book store I saw a shelf of Moleskine notebooks and picked up a pack of 3 small lined journals. I’ve divided one up with Post-it Durable Tabs into 6 contexts, clipped on a pen and I keep it in my pocket. The Post-it tabs are really nice. They should hold up to being stuffed in a pocket without getting bent and the adhesive will peel up without tearing the paper, so you can reposition them later if you need to resize the sections. A fine-point felt-tipped marker works best for labelling them; ball-point pen didn’t show up very well.

Changes:

• Fix missing import found by Huw Lynes
• Fix bug with “/” characters in filenames found by Huw Lynes
• Implement the “strip special characters” setting for removing non-shell-friendly characters
• capitalize GNOME

Download: ~ emusic-gnome-0.1.1.tar.gz

Darcs:

darcs get --tag=0.1.1 http://projects.matt-good.net/darcs/emusic-gnome/

Update: I’ve made a 0.1.1 release due to a couple crasher bugs.

Check the README for requirements and installation.

Current Features:

• open .emp files from the toolbar or on the command-line
• stop/start downloads
• progress meters show estimated time remaining
• preferences dialog based on Sound Juicer for setting the download location and file naming
• GnomeVFS support

Source Repository:

The source is available via Darcs:

darcs get http://projects.matt-good.net/darcs/emusic-gnome/

Hadess recently mentioned the crappy eMusic Linux client which I stopped using long ago and resorted to downloading the tracks individually in my browser. There is eMusic/J which was written out of spite for the Linux client, but I try to avoid running Java apps as much as possible.

So, I decided it was time to sit down and make a nice eMusic client for Linux. Poking at the eMusic/J source led me to decrypt-emp where they got the function for decoding eMusic’s “.emp” files. The emp decoding was easily ported to Python, and after learning a little PyGTK I’ve got a halfway decent prototype:

Stay tuned for a release. There are a couple things I need to fix, but the basic functionality should be ready shortly.

Features planned for the near future:

• display album art and extra track info
• use DBus to append tracks to the currently open instance
• show download progress in Mathusalem

In addition to now having a larger drive, reinstalling Ubuntu has my system running more smoothly than before. Hibernate was working out of the box and following some simple instructions I was able to switch to the accelerated Nvidia driver and maintain the working hibernate feature.

Also, I was attempting to redownload GTDTiddlyWiki Plus, which seems to have disappeared. In the process of looking for it I discovered another GTD-customization of TiddlyWiki: MonkeyGTD. It’s a bit more structured than GTDTiddlyWiki (Plus). It makes heavy use of tags to organize your contexts and tasks and seems to integrate a bunch of plugins to make managing tasks much simpler. So, at least in the process of recovering from the drive failure I’ve gotten a few benefits.

After my first week it generated a list of “neighbors” that shared my musical tastes. Now after another week it updated my listening charts again, and deleted my neighbors list! I guess I confused it from starting off with The Flaming Lips, Ween, and Lauren Hoffman topping my list, to MF DOOM, Girl Talk, and CunninLynguists the next week.

I guess it might take a little time for Last.fm to figure out my musical tastes.

Update: Either I was impatient, or Last.fm is reading my blog. I have a new set of neighbors now. Girl Talk’s “Night Ripper” was definitely the album to listen to last week. Girl Talk is the top weekly artist for most of my neighbors, and it’s the top mover on the Last.fm charts at 500%.