Python and PHP serialization

I have some data that I am pulling via Amara. I need to put that in a database. The app that uses that data is in PHP and would prefer the data to be serialized. Fortunately, there is help!
Scott Hurring: Code: Python: PHP Serialize implemented in Python: v0.4b
This is a python implementation of [...]

Good AS2 class for textfields

Just taking a note on this. It looks quite useful.
Easy Custom Scrollbar Class for TextFields (AS2) | Taterboy.com: Graphics, Multimedia and Such
Here is the twin brother of the Easy Scrollbar MovieClip Class
that works with TextFields. It does not require the masking and is
perfect for Input TextFields. It has all the features of the MovieClip
version except [...]

I simple have to check this out

openflux – Google Code
OpenFlux is an open-source component framework for Flex which makes radically custom component development fast and easy.

Pythonic grep sort of

Looking for a way to crank through files and search for specific text within matching files. Found this and it’s very neat.
Python: find files using Unix shell-style wildcards « Muharem Hrnjadovic
The download though was a little hard to find so I just got the source tar.gz file from here:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/al-maisan/ubuntu/pool/main/s/scriptutil/
[update]In the end I tried grep which [...]

Using Charles to test a SWF from a remote location

I just wanted to make sure I keep this note handy. Charles is already very cool. This just makes it cooler.
Testing a SWF From a Remote Location (Deitte.com)
Map Local
allows you to map URLs to local directories. This means that you can
test a SWF that should be on a remote site. It’s incredibly useful [...]

A good short-list of PHP frameworks

I have had to come back to PHP after a long hiatus. I prefer Python but recent projects require PHP and thus my return. I did a project recently with CodeIgniter which really is a spiffy project. But I would like a true OOP PHP5 MVC fast lightweight framework that has user auth, session management [...]

Custom Flex Calendar controls

I have worked with customizing the Flex calendar components and will probably need to do so again in the future, but this is pretty neat. I’ll have to look into this more soon.
Refreshingly new Flex Calendar controls « My journey in the world of RIA
Flex is a very flexible language and I’m here to prove [...]

Getting rid of the dreaded “can’t encode” errors with Python and MySQL and SqlSoup

So I was getting problems inserting data that has the ‘™’ symbol in it. Brutal stuff. Couldn’t find a way around it. Did it by hand in the end. Nasty. The problem was that I was getting
UnicodeEncodeError: ‘latin-1′ codec can’t encode character u’\u2122′ in position 12: ordinal not in range(256)
where the ‘\u2122′ is the ‘™’ [...]

Python Excel file reader

This thing is just brilliant! I am working on a project that uses PHP. But I still do my data mangling with Python because of tools like SqlSoup running under SqlAlchemy. Using those under iPython has saved incredible amounts of time. I actually like working with data in this way. It just makes it more [...]

Loading assets in AS3 and Flash

Loading up assets can be a pain to track so this set of code aims to simplify that. Need to check it out later though.
AYAN RAY | AS3 / Flash: Introducing the AssetLoader Class
In Actionscript 3, there are many different ways to load external assets from the Internet. Unfortunately, this can become tiresome to find [...]

Actionscript 3 Excel library

Adobe – Flex Extension
An Actionscript 3 library for reading and writing Excel files. Currently reading numbers, text, and formulas from Excel version 2.0-2003 and writing numbers, text, and dates to Excel 2.0 is supported. No server-side help is needed.

How to add duration info to a FLV file with the flvtool2 command

Very useful. Sometimes some flv conversion tools don’t include info that is vital for playback. In this case, the seekbar wouldn’t show up in the player until after playback finished. I’ll be testing to see if this resolves it but either way, this is good to know. The first hint was this post stating that [...]

Pure AS3 preloader

Well I wasn’t making a game but I just went through what the author describes: finishing up the app, gotta set up the preloader. I did a manual version of this but I like this idea. However I am not using FlashDevelop. I am in the Flash IDE for compiling. I have thought [...]

Howto: Flexbuilder 3 to debug Flash CS3 projects?!

I have to say… if you EVER have to code in AS3 for Flash, using Flexbuilder is just downright awesome. Code completion (that ignore case unlike the Flash IDE), refactoring support, all kinds of goodness in general. Man… even things like searching for references to a particular function throughout the code base of the project.  [...]

Django, Sphinx, and full-text search

This makes some interesting things possible. And it makes sense just looking at it. That’s even better.

Announcing django-sphinx 2.0.0 Full-text Search | David Cramer’s Blog

One of my tasks lately has been updating the django-sphinx
library to work with Sphinx 0.98, as it includes GIS components which
we have been wanting to possibly utilize [...]

Django blogging apps…

that are more or less ready to use. The list is at the following link.

Empty Thoughts: Django Blogging Apps
People ask about blogging apps for the Django platform all the time. I
have not investigated each and every one of these, but so far I still
feel pretty confident that not one of these is fully [...]

Bash and Django – working together

A note… definitely something to come back to.
Talk Funnel » Blog Archive » Django bash shell shortcuts

SmileyChris had a post up recently on setting up bash aliases for Django. He uses the classic alias command which works for one-line shortcuts. I got inspired to put mine up too, but if you want to [...]

Snippet to update Django tables to utf8

So you get the dreaded illegal mix of collations:
Pythoneer » Convert MySQL table to utf8
Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)
What do you do? Not too bad fortunately. And if you’re working with Django, it’s a little bit easier. Launch the shell with python manage.py shell. Then in the shell do something like [...]

Full-text search for Django

Just making a note…
Extending Django’s database API to include full-text search (Mercurytide)

Flash Javascript combo upload script…

Pretty cool. Just making a note of it.
SWFUpload News | SWFUpload
SWFUpload is a small JavaScript/Flash library to get the best of both worlds. It features the great upload capabilities of Flash and the accessibility and ease of HTML/CSS. See it in action….
* Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting [...]

A Django HttpRequest QueryDict is not your normal Python dict – i.e. getting ids from a friend request-form

Doesn’t work:
ids=request.GET['ids[]‘]
Does work:
ids=request.GET.getlist(‘ids[]‘)
A typical Facebook friend invite sends the ids to be invited to your site as an array in ‘ids[]‘. Normally, you can pull values out with just request.GET['key']. But since the value of this particular key is an array and not just a string, you can’t (at least I wasn’t able to) just [...]

Google, Search, Flex

Oooooh sweet. According to this article, Yahoo’s search API is still more “developer friendly”. Either way, having them available is quite cool.
Google Search REST API
More than one year after Google discontinued the SOAP Search API, it finally got a proper replacement. The AJAX Search API can now be used from any Web application, [...]

Python array copy

I had heard about passing by reference vs. passing by value. Here is a case of passing by reference.
In [76]: a=[1,2]In [77]: b=aIn [78]: b.append(3)In [79]: aOut[79]: [1, 2, 3]
That’s not what I was looking for. I was hoping to get ‘b’ to be [1, 2, 3] leaving ‘a’ unchanged. Oops. It passed ‘a’ to [...]

Concat Django Querysets

Here is a good discussion on concatenating Django Querysets. Very helpful! It also introduced me to itertools. This leads to some other talk about itertools. Very interesting!
The jist though is like this:
How do you concatenate two querysets? – Django users | Google Groups
import itertoolsq1 = Model1.objects.all()q2 = Model2.objects.all()for thing in [...]

Textmate and FBML… Eclipse/Aptana anyone?

I sure wish there was something like this for Eclipse and Aptana! Perhaps this could be a start? Here’s to hoping…!
Facebook Platform Developer Forum / TextMate FBML plugin
Put together a start of a TextMate Bundle for Facebook. Does some cool stuff, like code completion and doc lookup. If anyone wants [...]