Author: Administrator

I wrote a pretty sweet script tonight. It parallelizes the getmail retrieval process, while still printing prefixes so I know which accounts download which messages. This means that instead of my mail fetching process taking sum(i₁,…,i_n), where i is the length of time for a given mail retrieval, my fetching process now takes max(i₁,…,i_n).

#!/bin/sh
GETMAIL='python2.3 -Wignore /usr/bin/getmail'
unwanted() {
  grep -E -v '(Copyright|getmail|Simple)';
}

echo "N-WAY GETMAIL RETRIEVER SCRIPT:"
$GETMAIL \
  --rcfile=/etc/getmail/account1 \
  2>&1 | sed -e \
  's/.*/account1................: &/g' \
  | unwanted &

$GETMAIL \
  --rcfile=/etc/getmail/account2 \
  2>&1 | sed -e \
  's/.*/account2................: &/g' \
  | unwanted &

...

$GETMAIL \
  --rcfile=/etc/getmail/accountN \
  2>&1 | sed -e \
  's/.*/accountN................: &/g' \
  | unwanted &

wait

This is why I love Wikipedia.

PIDA 0.2.2 was released recently. This is truly a novel development in the Python/OSS world. What PIDA provides is a nice plugin system and the “makings” of an IDE. So, in a nice IDE you have a class browser, an integrated debugger, a profiler, maybe even a RAD-like GUI builder, an interpreter console, etc. The one piece that tends to be most controversial in every IDE is the text editor. This is one-part because UNIX people are really crazy about their text editors, but two-parts because text editors are very important programmer tools, and no one wants to learn a different text editor for every language one uses.

vim happens to be awesome for C programming, which is probably why a lot of UNIX hackers use it. But for Python, more advanced support would be nice. PIDA can run and connect to a vim server instance in order to allow you to have an “add-on IDE” for vim.

But even more interesting to me is the culebra plugin, which provides a code-completion-savvy GtkSourceView inheritor, which has the initial support for fancy Intellisense-like features.

I’ve already spoken to the developers of PIDA, and they said they would very much be interested in seeing Python Intellisense features brought to VIM. When I started thinking about different approaches to doing this, I realized that the whole OSS community could benefit from a general Python module that enhances the Python introspection features (and perhaps combines them with source code parsing) to make available nice productivity-enhancing features. I was thinking of calling this beast “Pyductivity.”

More on that later. For now, check out PIDA.