Viewing posts by Keith Brown
We're going to explain a few things about Python's object model here. Python's object model (at least with regard to data) can be viewed as being similar to Java's and C#'s if one considers only those languages' "class types", which are reference types.
We're going to create a simple, locally-deployed Django 2.0 web site here. Django is a backend web application framework for Python and is deployed using WSGI - the Python Web Services Gateway Interface. The Django code is essentially the controller in an MVC-style web application in which the models and views are supplied by the developer.
We're going to roll our own HTML table generator here. Most programmers have had fun at least once in their lives manually writing HTML. Once the practice is mastered, however, it's not something they want to continue to do - they're content to let the front-end design people handle it (if even they do any of it manually these days). But sometimes that's not an option, which is why many Python web frameworks provide HTML generation for forms, tables, and other kinds of markup.
We're going to roll our own hexdump program here. A hexdump program is a useful tool for a Python programmer. It allows one to learn about UTF-8 and other Unicode character encodings, examine input and output data, troubleshoot Python source code encoding, and so on.
We're going to explain a few things about accessing a MySQL database server from Python using MySQLdb here. MySQLdb is a Python DB API 2.0-compliant database adapter for the MySQL RDBMS. It wraps _mysql, which is a Python module written in C that implements most of the MySQL C API in similarly-named Python calls. Installation requires the MySQL client to be installed because it requires the MySQL client libraries.
We're going to explain a few things about character codes and encodings here. Even though there is increasingly only Unicode and UTF-8 these days, beginning developers continue to have a hard time.
We're going to explain a few things about nano keystroke configuration here. A post about a simple text editor might seem unnecessary, but I still meet junior admins who only think about vim or emacs. But nano has its place - it's installed on just about every system I come across, it's easy to use and it's quite capable. And with a little effort it can be reconfigured to use Windows-style keystrokes.
I was working with the mezzanine cms (built on django) and saw it was moving towards python3 support. Since the django and mezzanine projects prefer postgresql I decided it was time to check out the python database adapter for postgresql - psycopg - in python3.
In order to put up a python3 application on apache with mod_fastcgi I turned to the flup fastcgi-to-wsgi adapter which is also used by the django project for fastcgi deployment.
I needed to put up a python3 application on apache but had a python2/mod_python application that I couldn't touch, and since python2/mod_python and python3/mod_wsgi didn't play together (even with mod_wsgi in daemon mode), I used python3 with mod_fastcgi.
I find that most desktop users (and even some admins) don't have a firm grasp of linux time issues. It's true that in general time just works on linux, but there are times (no pun intended) when a knowledge of the key ideas comes in handy.
We're going to explain a few things about Bash redirection here. It's a perennial oldie-but-goodie topic that in my opinion is usually explained poorly.