Since yes­ter­day this blog is ten years old so, time for some his­to­ry.

It all start­ed in ad­voga­to where you could still read it to­day! (Please read it here in­stead ;-)

Then it moved to PyDS an ear­ly python desk­top blog plat­form with a web in­ter­face, and was host­ed in PyC­S, a free ser­vice.

Then PyCS kin­da died, and I start­ed gen­er­at­ing a stat­ic blog and host­ing it in my IS­P's free host­ing. That sucked bad.

Then I start­ed my own com­pa­ny, and I had my own server­s, so I start­ed host­ing it there (even to­day this blog is com­plete­ly stat­ic HTM­L!)

Then PyDS start­ed act­ing weird, so I wrote my own blog­ging soft­ware, which is a re­al mess, per­haps 25% fin­ished, but it does things ex­act­ly the way I like them.

Cur­rent­ly, this blog is syn­di­cat­ed in Plan­e­ta PyAr, Plan­et Python, Plan­et Qt, Plan­e­ta LUGLI, and a cou­ple oth­er places.

This year, I de­cid­ed to make the blog com­plete­ly bilin­gual (English and Span­ish), but I hate trans­lat­ing it.

Ac­cord­ing to the stats I have avail­able, the blog is in av­er­age more pop­u­lar now than ev­er (but yes, my most pop­u­lar posts were years ago ;-)

These are the most pop­u­lar pages in the last year:

• PyQt By Ex­am­­ple

  Each of the parts of this se­ries is in the top ten most vis­it­ed pages. So, I re­al­­ly need to write more in this area since it seems to be what brings peo­­ple to the site.

• Re­spond­ing to ran­­dom blog post­s.

  A post ex­­plain­ing how an­oth­er blog­ger is wrong. I think I make a good point, even if it's a bit cheap as a way to bring read­­er­s.

• Queue Man­age­­ment for Qmail

  Oldie but good­ie... not re­al­­ly use­­ful nowa­­days.

• How to make your own dis­­tro

  Yikes, peo­­ple, stop read­­ing this, it's just wrong :-(

• Python Keyring is se­ri­ous­­ly nice

  Fi­­nal­­ly some­thing re­­cen­t!

• What I do for a liv­ing

  An­oth­er new post, I like it a lot.

• The Lin­ux Boot­ing Process Un­veiled

  A di­­dac­tic post. I think it's still the bet­ter ex­­pla­­na­­tion on the sub­­­ject I've seen around, if I may say so my­­self. For ex­­tra irony points, my cur­rent dis­­tro does­n't fol­low this.

• Cre­at­ing pre­sen­­ta­­tions us­ing re­struc­­tured text

  An­oth­er not-­­so-old post, I do this a lot :-)

• Cus­­tom wid­gets us­ing PyQt

  This is al­­most 6 years old, for a de­p­re­­cat­ed ver­­sion of PyQt, and is com­­plete­­ly bro­ken for cur­rent ver­­sion­s. Stop read­­ing this.

Lesson­s:

1. I need to write more about Qt and/or start flame­wars with clue­­less IT writ­ers

2. I need to search for an­­cient ma­te­ri­al and de­p­re­­cate it

3. Hav­ing your own host­ing and blog­ging soft­­ware is neat

4. 10 years is a lot of time: 860 posts (or 913, de­pend­ing on how you coun­t)

Many pro­grams re­quire pass­words from the us­er.

It's nice when a pro­gram can re­mem­ber the pass­word you give it.

It's nicer when it stores said pass­word safe­ly. How­ev­er, it's not triv­ial to do that if you care for cross-­plat­form sup­port.

Or at least it was­n't un­til Kang Zhang wrote python keyring, a mod­ule that ab­stracts the pass­word stor­age mech­a­nisms for KDE, GNOME, OSX and win­dows (and adds a cou­ple of file-based back­ends just in case).

So, how does it work?

In­stall it in the usu­al way. If it's not pack­aged for your dis­tro/­op­er­at­ing sys­tem, just use easy_in­stal­l:

easy_install keyring

You could al­so get it from mer­cu­ri­al:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/kang/python-keyring-lib/

The API is sim­plic­i­ty it­self. This is how you save a se­cret:

import keyring
keyring.set_password('keyring_demo','username','thisisabadpassword')

You may get this di­a­log (or some ana­log on oth­er plat­form­s):

And here's the proof that it was saved cor­rect­ly (this is KDE's pass­word man­ager):

And how do you get the se­cret back?

import keyring
print keyring.get_password('keyring_demo','username')

This is how it run­s:

$ python load.py
thisisabadpassword

As you can see, the API is as easy as it could pos­si­ble get. It even chose the KWal­let back­end au­to­mat­i­cal­ly be­cause I am in KDE!

Python-keyring is a mod­ule that fix­es a big prob­lem, so a big thank you to Kang Zhang and Tarek Zi­adé (who had the idea)

First a short ex­pla­na­tion:

24-hour apps are smal­l, self­-­con­tained projects where I in­tend to cre­ate a de­cen­t, use­ful ap­pli­ca­tion in 24 hours. The con­cept is that:

1. I will think about this app a lot for a while

2. I will de­sign it in my head or in writ­ten notes

3. I will code, from scratch, for 24 hours.

4. That's not one day, re­al­­ly, but 24 hours of work. I can't work 24 hours straight any­­more.

The last time around this did­n't quite work as I in­tend­ed, but it was fun and ed­u­ca­tion­al (for me at least ;-) and the re­sult­ing app is re­al­ly not bad!

So, what's fo­ley go­ing to be? A note-­tak­ing app aimed at stu­dents and con­fer­ence pub­lic.

In your last geeky con­fer­ence, did you no­tice ev­ery­one is us­ing a com­put­er?

And what are they tak­ing notes on? Vi? Kwrite? OpenOf­fice? What­ev­er it is they use, it's not meant to be used for this pur­pose.

So, what will fo­ley do dif­fer­en­t? I don't quite know yet, but I have some ideas:

1. A strong time­­line ori­en­­ta­­tion. Ev­ery para­­graph will be dat­ed.

2. Twit­ter/I­­den­ti­­ca sup­­port. Want to live­blog your notes? Just click.

3. Mul­ti­me­­dia in­­­cor­po­rat­ed in the time­­line.

   • We­b­­­cam/Au­­­dio record­ing synced to your notes?

   • Im­ages im­­­port­ed and added in the time­­­line?

   • At­­­tach files to the time­­­line? (Use­­­ful for slides?)

4. If pro­vid­ed with a PDF of slides, at­­tach each slide to the right mo­­ment in the time­­line

5. Easy web pub­­lish­ing: find a way to put this on a we­b­­page easy and quick (s­in­­gle-click pub­­lish­ing is the goal)

I have on­ly thought about this for about 10 min­utes, but I see po­ten­tial here.

The bad news is... I have a ton of pay­ing work to do. So this will prob­a­bly on­ly hap­pen in Jan­u­ary. How­ev­er, I want­ed to post it so I can take in­put while in this plan­ning phase.

So, any ideas?

No, not unique in the sense "o­h, this app is a spe­cial snowflake", but unique in the sense "y­ou can on­ly run one copy of this ap­pli­ca­tion".

I tried googling for it and I al­ways found the same an­swer, "use dbus, try to own the name, if it ex­ists al­ready, then a copy is al­ready run­ning".

What I could not find is one work­ing ex­am­ple of this, or at least not some­thing con­ve­nient­ly la­beled "here is how you do a unique ap­pli­ca­tion us­ing dbus and python".

So, here is how you do a unique ap­pli­ca­tion us­ing dbus and python:

Sup­pos­ing your ap­pli­ca­tion is called uRSSus (mine is):

session_bus = dbus.SessionBus()
try:
    session_bus.get_object("org.urssus.service", "/uRSSus")
    # This is the second copy, make the first one show instead
    # TODO: implement
except dbus.DBusException: # No other copy running
    # This will 'take' the DBUS name
    name = dbus.service.BusName("org.urssus.service", bus=session_bus)
    # Now, start your app:
    window=MainWindow()
    object = UrssusServer(window,name)
    :
    :
    :
    etc, etc

And that's it. No, it's not hard, but since the DBUS docs seem to be... rather they seem al­most not to be some­times, ev­ery lit­tle bit may help.

How to write a tiny python app (less than 50 lines) that re­acts to events on the DBUS bus­es. For ex­am­ple, dis­play­ing a no­ti­fi­ca­tion when you press one of your key­board­s' spe­cial keys.

Read all about it