Planetary Ponderings

Yesterday I looked at very simple theming in Pylons, and mentioned that I'd prefer loading the current theme from the database rather than the configuration file. So this evening I decided to see if I could achieve that.

For a while I've been thinking about how to achieve themes in some of my Pylons applications, and just today I was looking around in my environment.py file, and saw the configuration of the templates and public directories. That gave me an idea, can I load a theme directory from the configuration file and use it in there?

I had a bit of a false start initially, I thought that I could just use the config object as I do elsewhere in my application, but that didn't want to work. Eventually I found the solution: the app_conf object.

This is how my code now looks:

Yesterday I had to buy a new printer because my old one packed up over the weekend. Since I run Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux exclusively at home, I needed a printer I could be sure would work in Linux. This means that generally I need to get either HP or Epson printers. I've had both makes of printers before, and they've both served me well, so I have no problem being "limited" to those two.

With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10 there has been a spate of negative publicity for this latest release, with a lot of people bemoaning broken upgrades and various other installation issues. Having only had 1 failure out of 7 upgrades, I thought I'd blog about my experience with the upgrade, and my thoughts on the new version of Kubuntu (since that's the particular flavour of Ubuntu that I use).

I've recently been looking at how to run cron jobs for Pylons applications, both for work and for Project HQ, my open source project management application. In looking for information on how to do that, I came across this page on the Pylons wiki, which suggested either getting easy_install to create a script for you, or registering a command with Paste Script (the paster command). I couldn't really see how getting easy_install to create a script was going to help me, so I decided to look into registering a command with Paste Script.

Recently I've been having some issues with sound in Linux. With writing OpenLP in PyQt4, we're using Phonon for audio and video output. However, to get a video to output to 2 displays at the same time, you have to use the GStreamer backend for Phonon.

That's all great, except that installing the GStreamer backend pulled in GStreamer (of course), which then pulled in PulseAudio. And PulseAudio killed my sound.

Last week I noticed that in one of my usual software updates, I got an upgrade to Quassel. The Ubuntu packager had packaged version 0.5rc1 and put it in the backports repository. This was all great, and I was amped to upgrade my Quassel Core to 0.5rc1 as well. Little did I know the issues it would cause...

Upgrading Quassel Core is usually a very simple process: shut down the old version and run the new version. This time didn't prove to be so successful. I ran the Core, it detected an older database and it upgraded the database. That all went well, and then the trouble started.

I have recently started a new project, as an off-shoot of the Christians in OSS blog that I was part of, also called Christians in OSS. This one, however, is a mailing list-based community of Christians who want to see Open Source Software promoted in the Church and in Christian organisations.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I've finally released a new version of Project HQ, with some significant functionality added. Last night I uploaded version 0.1.3 to SourceForge.net's servers.

From time to time, I've talked about my open source lyrics projection application, openlp.org, which is written in Python and Qt4 using the PyQt4 bridge. One of the core features of openlp.org is to display lyrics on a second monitor using the current "theme," which is a collection of settings for displaying the lyrics (background, font, etc).