Have you ever heard about Kivy?

Kivy is an open source software library for rapid development of applications equipped with novel user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps. It is completely cross-platform (Linux/OSX/Win) and released under the terms of the GNU LGPL.

It comes with native support for many multi-touch input devices, a growing library of multi-touch aware widgets and hardware accelerated OpenGL drawing. Kivy is designed to let you focus on building custom and highly interactive applications as quickly and easily as possible.

With Kivy, you can take full advantage of the dynamic nature of Python. There are thousands of high-quality, free libraries that can be integrated in your application. At the same time, performance-critical parts are implemented in the C language.

Seems really cool and I'm gonna give it a try for sure.

http://kivy.org

Python 2.7 on Google App Engine

Very interesting session on Google input/output 2012.

The App Engine Python 2.7 runtime is more than a simple upgrade to the Python 2.5 runtime - it has fewer restrictions, introduces some popular third-party libraries and allows for concurrent requests. The session will explain how to get the most out of these new capabilities.

URL: https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/gooio2012/300/

Fantastic Armadillo news!

Two great news to share with you:

Armadillo Live! 1.1 compatibility with Firefox 15.*

Firefox's automated tests did not detect any compatibility issues with Armadillo Live! add-on and Firefox 15.*.


Armadillo Live! included in the Softpedia Mac OS software database

Armadillo Live! has been added to Softpedia's database of software programs for Mac OS. It is featured with a description text, screenshots, download links and technical details on this page:

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Internet-Utilities/Firefox-Extensions/Armadillo-Live.shtml

PostgreSQL 9.1 Change data base encoding from ASCII to UTF-8

In my particular case, I have an ASCII data base that is being updated from a windows application and also from a Linux web application, in python.

In this scenario, the key is to understand that the data base contains UNICODE characters and also contains non-ascii characters, say LATIN1. This mix is a problem.

Best solution I found on Linux:

Precondition: Perform a dump
pg_dump -h localhost MyASCIIDataBase > /tmp/db.sql

1-  Gnu iconv

Let iconv do the magic:
iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 /tmp/db.sql -o /tmp/iconv.sql

Create an empty Unicode(UTF-8) database and run:
psql -h localhost MyIconvUTFDataBase < iconv.sql

Note: This solution will work for non-ascii characters, such as latin1 or windows charsets, but you will have trouble with UTF-8 characters.

2- Gnu recode (Under Ubuntu, run apt-get install recode)

Lets make recode work on the dump file:
recode -f UTF-8 /tmp/db.sql

Next, create another empty Unicode(UTF-8) database and run:
psql -h localhost MyUTFDataBase < db.sql

Note: This solution will work for all UTF-8 characters, but non-ascii characters will be deleted.


Finally, you can combine these two solutions to get what you want, one database with all UTF-8 characters.
The way I did it was to dump each single table from MyIconvUTFDataBase that was updated from windows (with latin1), and then restore each single table on MyUTFDataBase (restored from recode):


Steps to do it for a single table:

1- Remove table form MyUTFDataBase
2- Dump the table from the iconv data base:

pg_dump -h localhost -t '"schema"."tableName"' MyIconvUTFDataBase -f /tmp/single_table.sql

3- Restore the table to the "recode" data base (MyUTFDataBase):
psql -f single_table.sql MyUTFDataBase


Hope this post might be helpful for you.

Wow! Ubuntu Quickly is amazing!

Use Quickly to build your first Ubuntu app. It's easy.

Can't wait to try it out.

New version of Armadillo!

After a year from last update of Armadillo, I decided to improve the code and make Armadillo more effective. Version 1.1 will be available soon for install. Stay tune.