Peterbe.com

Zope is really great with it's publisher transform things that automatically cast HTTP GET or HTTP POST variables as proper python variables on the fly. I needed a form that asks for a Title and Description in multiple languages. The result I wanted passed into the saving method was variables like this:

>>> titles
{'en': u'London', 'sv': u'Stockholm'}
>>> descriptions
{'en': u'Capital', 'sv': u'Huvudstad'}

How did I write that form? Easy, here's the code:

<b>Title</b><br />
Svenska: <input name="title.sv:record" /><br />
English: <input name="title.en:record" /><br />
<b>Description</b>
Svenska: <input name="description.sv:record" /><br />
English: <input name="description.en:record" /><br />

As some of my friends on this website have might have noticed, I was threatened by Carphone Ware because of supposed defamatory comments made on this page

Here's an interesting article on BBC News about a case (in USA I should add) where a blogger could not be sued for the comments other people placed on her blog.

"Overturning a decision by the San Francisco appeal court, the court ruled that people claiming they were defamed online could now only seek damages from the original author of the comments - and not the website which re-posted it."

I need to think a bit more about it before I resurrect the currently removed comments from the page about Carphone Warehouse.

What a good little website this is! It's a database with nutritional information about different kinds of food, like bran flakes, meatballs or hot dogs

The search isn't great but it could just be because it's a limited database they have to work with. One immediate piece of feedback; it'd be great if when you do a search that it shows the search form again if you want to change your search term when you're confronted by the results. Look for example at this search result

Here are some amazing images of a less than safe road somewhere in China. I get an uncomfortable feeling in my stomage of just watching these but still deep inside I really want to go there and experience it myself. ...if my mom would let me, that is.

I know that they've got some similar roads in Spain but I can't remember where so I can't dig up any pictures.

My Firefox froze in one of the tabs when in another tab I had a long Fry-IT intranet blog half finished. To avoid having to rewrite the whole text again Jan showed me how to dump the RAM memory onto disk which I could then look through with standard tools. For this to work you have plenty of diskspace since the dump file is about 1Gb big:

$ sudo su -
# df -h
# cat /proc/kcore > /usr/kcore.dump
# strings /usr/kcore.dump > /usr/kcore.strings
# ls -lh | grep kcore
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root    1016M 2006-10-30 10:18 kcore.dump
-rw-r--r--   1 root    root      74M 2006-10-30 10:19 kcore.strings
# less kcore.strings | grep 'Bla bla bla'

Was this the most boring blog item I've written in a long time? Maybe, but it's good to have it noted the next time Firefox crashes.

Today I travelled on the Oxfordtube which is a coach service from central London to Oxford. It takes about 100 minutes and the busses are quite comfortable. On the saturday night before this morning's ride I bought a ticket online to save myself some time I thought. Turns out that even that I didn't know or notice it, I had bought a ticket for the 10:01 service from Victoria so my ticket was invalid as I boarded the 08:05 service. Thus, I had to buy another ticket or wait on by the bus stop till 10.01!

The crazy thing is, that nowhere does it say "10:01" when you buy the ticket!! Absolutely nowhere!

Another annoying thing is that the ticket you get when you buy online is a weird email with the subject line "CARD Transaction". It tells you on the website to print this page out, but since I don't have a printer at home I had to write down the Merchants ID and the Transaction ID and show these long numbers to the bus driver, who I should add, was a very polite and nice man. This is what the CARD Transaction email looked like

Here are a few lessons learnt when sending HTML emails in Zope with unicode data. I'm still a beginner with this stuff and still probably have a lot to learn. What I've achived now works but might break with different encodings or on different systems so don't assume that these patterns will work in your setup.

To the send the email I'm using the default MailHost that comes with Zope 2.8.5. I call it's send() passing the subject line a second time because the subject line is already in the body string.

The most valuable piece of magic to learn and remember from this is that when you construct the multi-part message you have to attach the plain text before the html text. Thank you Lukasz Lakomy for that tip!

I'm not a bash expert. Now I need some help with some bash syntax.

I copied a function called get_key which takes a 1 character length string from the stty input and assigns it to a variable. It's nifty because I can prompt something like this:

Select task:
1 - Task XYZ
2 - Task F19
3 - Task 123
q - quit

I've recently registered now set up a new domain name for this website. It's peterbe.mobi and is there to the be mobile version of the pages.

I've also made some of these slight improvements to the css for mobile and removed the category images on the blog items. There is so much more that I can do but I just haven't had time. For example, there's no search on the mobile version.

The screenshot here to the right is from a Firefox extension I have called "Small Screen Rendering" which is useful if you want to get a guessimate look of how your page might appear in browser with a very small screen. Immediate conclusion: there's a hell of a lot of scrolling :)

Ricardo Semler is in London for the Leaders In London conference I would love to go the £2,500 (USD 4,649) for the 2-day conference package :( That's not the worst part. The worst part is that the leadersinlondon.com website.

It looks like one of those Get-Rich-Now-Quick-scheme site with faked testimonials and big bold red letters that you sometimes accidentally land on when you by accident click an ad link. leadersinlondon.com starts with an intrusive popup ad that you have to close to be able to read the content behind it. I would link to the page with the prices but it's a popup without scrollbars.