February 15th 2010
November 17th 2009
Getting back on track
Yes, I’m alive.
Since the second half of last summer I’ve been inactive in the Free Software arena. No commits, no emails from me in the last few months which may indicate that the projects are dead. So I wanted to write to let you know that I have no plans to stop maintaining any of my projects. I will start to catch up with all the things I’ve missed in the projects I normally contribute to and the projects I develop alone.
The reason why you’d heard nothing from me is that I left Spain to move to Oxford, in order to work at the cool company behind 2degreesnetwork.com. The removal was the most time-consuming and stressful thing I’d ever done, but after one month working here, I’m happy to say that it was worth it. The atmosphere is just like I thought Web 2.0 companies were, and I am surrounded by nice and talented people. I can’t be happier.
Well, back to the projects, I had to wait a lot to get access to the Internet at home, but I got it a couple of weeks ago and have been catching up (slowly) with the pending stuff. I still have a huge stack of unanswered emails, for example.
For the last couple of weeks I was working fulltime on repoze.what 1.1 and repoze.what-django. I hope to finish the documentation and get the first alpha releases out very soon; the code itself is pretty much ready and, as usual, fully tested. I didn’t have plans to do a repoze.what 1.1 release anytime soon, but while developing repoze.what-django I found myself implementing something which would be useful outside Django (i.e., ACLs) and thus I decided to move it to repoze.what.
After that, I want to improve the auth documentation in TurboGears 2. repoze.what-pylons is the crucial part of the repoze.what integration in TG2 and it’s fully documented, but duplicating part of those docs won’t do any harm and adding some tips and tricks would be nice. I started doing that some months ago but never committed it; I have to finish it this time.
Then I’d like to make repoze.what-pylons take advantage of the new features in repoze.what 1.1, like repoze.what-django already does.
That’s it for the foreseeable future. Next year I really want to get serious with Booleano and PyACL.
July 29th 2009
Koren’s SVD++ Python Implementation
I recently had to implement a recommender system for the Netflix Prize. Out of the best known models, I chose Yehuda Koren’s SVD++ model as published on the paper entitled “Factorization Meets the Neighborhood: a Multifaceted Collaborative Filtering Model” (the version that doesn’t take into account temporal effects; I’d have implemented the complete model, but couldn’t due to time constraints).
I named this Python-based project “wooflix” and you can download it from code.gustavonarea.net. It ships with a command-line interface and basic documentation, including the design document.
It’s the first project, as far as I know, that uses Booleano. With it, you can get random movie recommendations and filter them, like this:
# Get 5 movie recommendations for user #7, at least those published after 2001
wooflix recommendations 7 --max="5" --filter="movie:year > 2001"
Keep in mind that I won’t offer support for it; I’m publishing because I thought it might be useful for some people, but I have no intentions to work on it in the future.
July 17th 2009
Announcing Booleano
I am proud to announce the first alpha release of Booleano, a Python-based interpreter of boolean expressions:
Booleano is an interpreter of boolean expressions, a library to define and run filters available as text (e.g., in a natural language) or in Python code.
In order to handle text-based filters, Booleano ships with a fully-featured parser whose grammar is adaptive: Its properties can be overridden using simple configuration directives.
On the other hand, the library exposes a pythonic API for filters written in pure Python. These filters are particularly useful to build reusable conditions from objects provided by a third party library.
It’s been designed to address the following use cases:
- Convert text-based conditions: When you need to turn a condition available as plain text into something else (i.e., another filter).
- Evaluate text-based conditions: When you have a condition available as plain text and need to iterate over items in order to filter out those for which the evaluation of the condition is not successful.
- Evaluate Python-based conditions: When you have a condition represented by a Python object (nothing to be parsed) and need to iterate over items in order to filter out those for which the evaluation of the condition is not successful.
It is a project I found necessary while working on repoze.what 2, which I’ve been developing for the last few months in my spare time. This release is absolutely usable, but lacks documentation because I needed this release out for a (small) project I need to work on ASAP (it will depend on Booleano). The next release will ship with a nice documentation, I promise.
June 15th 2009
Cracked last week
My VPS provider was cracked last week by an attacker who removed everything on the host machines (yes, the frightening “rm -rf /”!), so my sites (including what.repoze.org) had been down until yesterday night.
The attack was performed on Sunday, but I had to wait until Friday to get a new server (fortunately I don’t host anything sensitive here). Then I spent two more days setting up the new server from scratch (not that it was too complex, but I didn’t have much time to do it). That’s why it took so much time for the sites to be back.
I believe that everything on the repoze.what website and the documentation for my Repoze plugins has been restored. But if you find anything broken (e.g., if an URL changed), please let me know.
September 8th 2008
Enable LDAP authentication in your WSGI applications!
repoze.who.plugins.ldap is an straightforward yet powerful solution to enable LDAP authentication in your WSGI application. It enables you to have LDAP authentication working in your new or existing applications, in few minutes and with few lines of code!
It’s a plugin for the repoze.who framework, featuring not only an LDAP authenticator, but also related utilities. It’s a fully documented project which also ships with a working demo application, so it’d be hard for you to get stuck.
I wrote this plugin in order to enable LDAP authentication in Animador. And in fact, it’s the first application that uses the plugin.
The latest version is 1.0, and you’re highly encouraged to play with it and give feedback!
August 18th 2008
Joining the development of TurboGears
I’ve had the great pleasure of being invited by the TurboGears team to become an official committer for the great TurboGears framework.
This is because I’ve been contributing patches for TurboGears 2 and other packages used by Animador (a TurboGears 2 application), since I started its development, in order to fix bugs and/or add new features that I want in Animador. So now I can apply my changes by myself! 
And stay tunned, because very soon it’s going to be very easy to add OpenId support to any WSGI application by means of a plugin for the framework-independent repoze.who package!
July 27th 2008
Python Developers: Help Us Promote Freedomware!
GNU/Linux Matters is looking for Python developers to develop the upcoming multicultural SpreadFirefox.com-like platform to promote freedomware and Linux.
