Some interesting bits from the past few weeks... Next Tuesday I'll be having lunch with Mike Cermak, webmaster for the
Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. In
my previous entry I mentioned my
RTA Schedule project which has been gaining popularity. There were only a few routes listed on there when I posted it, and the list has been growing as people have been using the route adder. Mike wants to work together to come up with ideas and improvements that will encourage projects like mine—a very cool response, and beneficial to RTA users as well. I'm looking forward to it! Remember
those wacky import tricks I posted about to get multiple database engines working nicely in
Pagoda? After coming up with that, Ian dug around to figure out what changes would be necessary to not have to do that. He narrowed it down to one single line of code in TurboGears! In
turbogears.database
:
def create_session():
"Creates a session with the appropriate engine"
return sqlalchemy.create_session(bind_to=get_engine())
That
bind_to argument is totally unnecessary when using
DynamicMetaData! Changing that to just use SQLAlchemy's
create_session without arguments makes multiple database engines possible without any black magic. Unfortunately, we didn't notice
TurboGears 1.0.2 about to be released and didn't start any discussion about changing this in time. For now we use this little monkeypatch:
session_context = turbogears.database.session.context
session_context.registry.createfunc = sqlalchemy.create_session
So I think it works more like
Alchemyware now, except we don't have to write models any differently and the engines are cached. The metadata is simply pointed to the appropriate engine in each thread. Speaking of
Pagoda, we're still at least a couple weeks away from a beta release. We're currently writing glue for all the little bits and pieces we've created over the past couple months. We've satisfied many of our original goals and learned more about (and sometimes changed) others. I'll share more about these satisfied and modified goals later. Pagoda's third contributor,
Chris, moved back home to start hunting for jobs in the California area. Good luck, Chris! Chris is a fine electrical engineer and programmer and you should hire him. This was his plan since starting to help with Pagoda, so it doesn't really affect our development schedule. After receiving practically no feedback from the release of
dmath, there has been a small surge of interest recently, with a couple contributions, so there will likely be a new release. I put up a
new egg of the old version on the Cheese Shop after learning that the Python 2.5 version was busted.
geopy continues to receive patches; recently the most-requested improvement was contributed by
Amos Latteier and that is the removal of
print chatter in favor of logging. I'll get 0.94 out this weekend with that and other improvements. Since Chris moved out, our friend Greg moved in with me and Sara. Greg went to school for art and likes to paint and draw, and might even prove his cooking talents at culinary school next semester. I'll be helping him make a website for his comics, which are very funny, but I can't decide if it's because I know Greg and imagine him coming up with them, which itself makes me laugh. You'll be the judge soon enough... There are two more new, smaller residents of our apartment as well... one's a 14-inch
Oscar cichlid and the other's a 15-inch
Plecostomus. They're friendly and big! Now I have fantasies about getting them a bigger aquarium with all manner of luxuries. I picked them up from someone who's graduating and they came with their 45-gallon home and necessities for free! I'll post some pictures of these guys soon.
Photos courtesy of
Tremont West Development Corporation
Photos courtesy of
Tremont West Development Corporation
