James Zhuo 卓宇翔: Code

Python Decorators

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:50:35 GMT

Using python decorators you can easy do inject behaviours through declaration.
A good example of how this might be used in an web application is as follows

@authenticated
def home(request):
""" a function to handle web request for the home page """
.... code to handle web request ....

@authenticated injects authentication functionality through a decorator implemented
as either a Python decorator function or decorator class. Here's a great 3 part tutorial on
python decorators http://muharem.wordpress.com/2006/10/18/3/

One of those lovely things about python.

Python Humour (Sorry if you are not a programmer)

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:23:50 GMT

This was some python geek's signature in a python mailing list that I've recently joined. I thought it's quite funny.

"Thus spake the Lord: Thou shalt indent with four spaces. No more, no less. Four shall be the number of spaces thou shalt indent, and the number of thy indenting shall be four. Eight shalt thou not indent, nor either indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Tabs are right out."

C# Coding Standard

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:55:22 GMT

I've been using this as a guideline for my C# based projects for a while now. It's by Juval Lowy. They call him .net legend. I've met him once at a user group, very smart guy no doubt, but as you would probably expect, also came across as being a bit arrogant. Juval's guideline has served very well, but the reason for this post is really because I've found an alternate guideline published by Microsoft which is 99% identical to Juval's that I think is much quicker to skim through because it focuses mainly on naming conventions .

The Microsoft naming guideline can be found here. enjoy :)

Handy SVN commands, much faster than using a GUI tool

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:34:28 GMT

Here's some handy SVN commands I use on a daily basis.

> svn help
Lists all svn commands

> svn update
Compares and updates all files under version control in the context of the current directory

> svn add [directory_name]or[file_name]
Add a file or directory under version control

> svn help [command]
If you want to know more about a particular command

> svn delete [directory_name]or[file_name]
Remove file or directory from version control

> svn commit -m "commit message"
Sends all changes to version control

This is generally enough to get me through the day :)

Oh almost forgot, svn stat this is a really useful one, you will never miss another uncommited file again.

PS: If you ever need to delete all the .svn folders, use these unix commands
> find . -type d -name .svn
> rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`
I've found it here and it works really well.

Handy MySQL 5 commands to help you navigate the database

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:01:13 GMT

I've found MySQL Admin/Query Browser very cumbersome on OSX. So I've resorted to using command lines instead to get an overall picture of the database. This has worked surprisingly well, there is a bit of typing, but you can get every where on the keyboard which is generally much faster than using a GUI interface for programming tasks.

In Mac OSX you can install MySQL5 using mac port
> port install mysql5

To login to mysql5 (no password has been set for root user in this case)
> mysql5 -u root

To get a list of databases available
> show databases;

To use a particular database
> use [database_name]

To show all tables in the database
> show tables;

To show fields from a table
> show fields from [table_name];
> desc [table_name]; (much shorter)

To show indexes for a table
> show index from [table_name];

From just those few commands you can pretty much get a good picture of the database, particularly hard-to-remember field names. There's a more comprehensive list from someone else here.