99% of Gargoyles ...

Right, if Patrick can do it, so can I.

I've installed Movable Type and this page will no longer be updated.

The new page for 99% of Gargoyles ... is here. See you on the other side.

Hot Off the Presses

PythonCard is a GUI construction kit for building cross-platform desktop
applications on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Release 0.6.6 includes 30 sample applications, new additions include a
source code editor and a sample for creating flat file databases. This
release also supports the new wxPython 2.3.3 preview for Mac OS X.

All the information you need about PythonCard can be found on the project
web page at:
http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/

The installation instructions and walkthroughs are available on the main
documentation page:
http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

You can download the latest release at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=19015

For a list of some of the samples that have been built with PythonCard and
screenshots of them in action go to:
http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/samples.html

A description of each sample is included in the readme.txt file in each
sample directory.

The kind people at SourceForge host the project:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pythoncard/

If you want to get involved the main contact point is the Mailing list:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pythoncard-users

PythonCard requires Python 2.1.x or later and wxPython 2.3.2.1 or later.
wxPython can be downloaded at http://www.wxpython.org/

There is a new release of PythonCard coming out this week, lots of interesting new goodies ...

Meanwhile I'm struggling with a way to come up with transparent persistent storage in an easy to use desktop development environment. The existing flatfileDatabase sample is my starting point. In it Kevin takes a Model-View-Controller approach to storing fairly standard address records in a text file. The storage approach is fairly forceful, it simply saves the current record when you navigate out of it, but it should prove an interesting test bed for integrating other storage mechanisms. Top of my heap are shelve and MySQL.

What I need to do is implement a generic storage mechanism. Inspired by the contents of weblib and bdoz how is this for a first stab at a super class definition;

class Storage:
    def open(self):
        "Initialise this storage object"
        pass
    def store(self, table, **row):
        "Store an item"
        pass
    def fetch(self, table, id):
        "Fetch an item by its key"
        pass
    def find(self, table, where):
        "Find an item by a non-key value"
        pass
    def delete(self, table, id):
        "Remove an item permanently"
        pass
    def _insert(self, table, **row):
        raise NotImplementedError
    def _update(self, table, **row):
        raise NotImplementedError

The stored items would be passed arounds as dictionaries I think. This makes interfacing with ZODB and shelve quite easy and is quite analagous for us RDBMS types.

I think I will let this kick around in my subconscious for a bit before I actually get off my bum and try and implement it.

PythonCard Screen Shots

Kevin has posted a Windows screen shot, Dan has posted a Macintosh one, here is a Linux shot of the Widget sample that ships with PythonCard;

How does it look to you?

Hang on a minute

Robert Scoble uses a court case to illustrate that many people can have different truths at the same time. I'll skip over this spurious discussion and concentrate on the completely ludicrous opinion he shares with us, his humble readers, at the end of the piece as he draws the discussion around to the Microsoft court case;

Which monopoly would I rather deal with? Bill Gates or Steve Case's? I can answer that one easily: I fired Steve Case from my computer seven years ago and I ain't planning on letting him back on any time soon.

Well, duh, you removed AOL from your computer because you could. The whole point about the Microsoft monopoly is that it is impossible to buy a personal computer these days without a Microsoft operating system on it. For more details, go and read The Register. The reason Mr Scoble hasn't got rid of Bill Gates from his computer is because he can't. Well, you can, but that is a whole other story.

Neighbours

Today its time to embrace the great blog-dom. As all you get from radio is a pesky number (this blog is number 100917) I thought I would see who the neighbours are. Say hello to;

Number 100916 : Jim Cuene
Number 100918 : Marcel Neuhausler

Tell them Andy sent you.

Reboot

Time for a reboot. I've managed to upgrade this laptop to the latest testing version of Debian. So I'm going to reboot into that partition and try and live as a Linux user for the next few days.

As Radio runs only on Windows (and then only in IE - grrr) this means no posts to this weblog. I will be back though, and I will let you know how I got on when I get back.

Editing

Hold the presses, stop working, down your tools and look at this.Woops, they've been slashdotted so access may be a little slow.

Essentially, the KVim project is going to embed Vim in the KDE desktop. Life is complete. Now all I need to do is finish upgrading this machine to Woody and I'll be spending most of my time in Linux land.

Since learning vi on Convergent Technologies boxes in the early nineties it is the only editor I have found that I can use on any platform and incredibly productively, and I know I only use about twenty percent of the features available.

Having that kind of editing power embedded in the web browser, mail client and file explorer of my desktop is just the kind of feature that will tip me over into the Linux world. I've been existing in a shadow land, booting between Debian and Windows2000 but this may be the straw which breaks this particular camel's reliance on the lovely people from Redmond.