Jeff presents Joomla! I present Drupal! The two web site frameworks go head to head at our next meetup this evening.

More info and RSVP form.

Thanks to Noosphere Networks, I’m releasing a script that helps developers of web sites built with Drupal to maintain separate development/test and production sites, pushing changes from test to production as needed. This is challenging with a stock Drupal installation. Changes to PHP code are no problem, because it lives in the filesystem and can be copied or committed to a revision-control system like Subversion. But a lot of Drupal’s configuration work take place within its web administration interface and is saved to the database, where production content such as user accounts and comments is also stored.

The desire to do this frequently comes up on Drupal’s forums, and the typical workarounds have some large drawbacks (involving some combination of extended downtime on the production site, duplication of work, and the loss of content, comments, and user account changes made in the interim).

This small script attempts to solve that by categorizing Drupal’s tables and moving only the right ones at the right time, while handling details such as merging sequence numbers. It also dumps Drupal’s databases to disk in a format that works well for checkin to a revision control system.

This is free software, licensed under the GPL.

There’s a more ambitious project called AutoPilot that aims to do this and more in the future, but its ability to merge test sites into production without losing production content isn’t available yet, and I needed something now.

Be warned, though, that this is an alpha release, intended for those with familiarity with MySQL and Drupal’s table layout. If you have CCK fields, there may be some manual work required when you modify your field layout because CCK tends to change your database schema, and Migraine does not currently attempt to automate all of those changes. It will detect them and warn of the problem, however.

See more information at the Migraine project page.

We have a new location and a guest speaker for our April meetup. Nate Abele of the CakePHP project will be here to show off the rapid web development framework and answer questions. We’ll make time for discussion too.

The new location is a really nice conference room at the Johnson & Wales Academic Center, with everything that implies (i.e. a projector).

All programming skill levels welcome. If you’re going to be in the Providence, RI area and can make it, please see here for more details and to RSVP:

Providence PHP April Meetup [meetup.com]

Lots of geeky news. I took over officially as organizer of the Providence PHP meetup this month, and our next event is at 729 Hope St on Tuesday, February 6 at 7 PM. So join us for coffee, pastry, a wide-ranging, informal discussion of anything related to programming with PHP, or all three.

This time, we’ll probably share some of the projects we’re working on, so bring some screenshots or a quick demo if you’d like. (If this starts to run long, we can always go into more depth next month.)

Please RSVP.

If your usual lunch crowd doesn’t talk enough about computers for your taste, escape with us to the monthly Providence Web Developers Lunch Hour. (Chris, the usual organizer, won’t be able to make it, so I’m hosting in his place.) Please RSVP here.

fs2svn is a new, free, open-source tool that converts a bunch of archive folders into a Subversion repository.

If you’ve kept a series of historical snapshots of your work in folders, fs2svn can help you upgrade to a full-fledged version control system.

fs2svn goes through all the folders under a given parent folder (in filesystem order) and creates a Subversion revision for each one, backdated to the most recent file’s last modified date. The log message is set to the folder name.

Additions, changes, and deletions between one folder and the next are all recorded in the repository.

The input format is very simple. It only covers the mainline trunk, not any tags or branches (though tags for major versions could be manually created later, if your folder names carry enough information).

The format is so simple it could be used as a common intermediary. If you wanted to migrate a mainline trunk from some exotic version control system to Subversion, you could write a script to export it to regular folders, then use this script to import the result into Subversion.

See the main fs2svn page for information, examples, and to download.

I had a problem where my scripted FTP uploads through ftplib in Python 2.3 would experience long (6 or 7-second) delays before transferring each file. Other FTP programs were fine, except for a similar delay on connect. It turned out to be an interaction with ftplib’s IPv6 support in Python 2.3 and the Mac OS X name resolver, and it finally appears to be fixed in the recently-released Mac OS X 10.3.8, which noted speed improvements in certain network applications.

In case the delay bites anyone else (or in case it’s not really fixed, and some other network change is just fooling me) here’s the workaround I’ve been using until now.

With IPv6 support in Python 2.3 / Mac OS X 10.3, ftplib’s ntransfer function now calls getaddrinfo for every single file tranferred, and the name resolver does a slow timeout each time. Making a local copy of ftplib and replacing the call to getaddrinfo with constants may be ugly, but it worked around the problem.

Original line (multi-second delay), at ftplib.py line 233:

af, socktype, proto, canon, sa = socket.getaddrinfo(host, port, 0, socket.SOCK_STREAM)[0]

Changed line (assumes IPv4 addresses):

af, socktype, proto, canon, sa = (2, 1, 6, '', (host, port))

This change speeds up multi-file FTP transfers immensely (at least to my FTP server) under Mac OS X 10.3.0 through 10.3.7, but early results indicate it’s not necessary on 10.3.8.

Why does Windows still suck?

The most surprising figure in the article–that 91% of PCs are infected (or maybe the word should be “infested”)–sounds high, but gets some anecdotal support in comments in Brent Simmons’ weblog.

Bill Bumgarner’s useful Dupinator script, for removing duplicate files, recently hit Python-URL. However, it has a logic bug that end up deleting too many files.

If you have several sets of duplicates that happen to share the same file size, all but one of the sets will be wiped out completely. The problem is that within each group of files of identical size, there’s at most a single generated “duplicates” list. The first file on the list is spared; the rest are deleted.

The net effect, when I tested the script on a large corpus of text files, was the program reported it would delete many files that were clearly not identical. (I had commented out the os.remove call for testing.)

There was an additional problem with iPhoto: the posted script follows symbolic links. iPhoto stores its albums as collections of symbolic links, so all photos in albums are flagged as duplicates of the original photos. An islink() test fixes this.

Here’s a modified version of the script. It has only been lightly tested, though the changes did successfully eliminate the false positives. Uncomment the os.remove() line only when you are satisfied with the list of redundant files generated.

Minor optimizations: all files < = 1024 bytes go directly into the dupes list, not potentialDupes, since the whole file has already been checked. Also, Mac OS X’s pesky .DS_Store files are skipped.

(I haven’t heard back from Bill yet on incorporating the fixes into his code, so I’m posting here.)

View Source Code (dupinator.py)

WordPress 1.2 now has an its own RSS import feature. However, it’s based on a different technique (regular expressions) than the code I contributed in January (which uses a true XML SAX parser). So I’m posting the code here as open source under the GPL license. This code has some additional features:

• It can import single files from either your local drive or from a URL you specify, or it can import entire folder hierarchies of RSS files (blogBrowser-style: one folder per year, one file per month), making it a general-purpose weblog batch import tool using RSS as the exchange format.
• It aggregates RSS feeds, if you point one or more copies of it at feeds on the web and set it to run regularly. (Even when run frequently, it won’t import the same item twice.) You can also use this to maintain more than one WordPress site that shares the same content, such as a test site and a production site.
• It handles time zones in a sophisticated way, preserving the timezone offset so that each item can appear on your weblog under the author’s original local time, while using GMT for all date comparisons.
• It respects and stores modification dates if given in the RSS file.
• If modification dates are given in the RSS file, it can optionally import only new or changed posts, leaving posts alone that haven’t been changed or that have been changed more recently on the local machine.
• Using the above feature and two copies of WordPress, it can synchronize two or more weblogs, bidirectionally or multi-directionally. New and changed posts on any one weblog will automatically show up on the others.
• It complies with the XML specification, for correct behavior with XML namespaces with arbitrary prefixes and CDATA sections in arbitrary locations, both of which can trip up a regular-expression-based parser.

As long as your RSS feed passes the XML well-formedness test (which it probably does, even if it doesn’t validate according to the RSS Validator), you can use this RSS Import filter. If it’s not well-formed XML, you’re better off with the RSS import filter built into WordPress.

Versions are available for WordPress 0.9 through 1.2.

More Info and Download

Now available: RSSFilter, an open source Python module for modifying RSS files and blogBrowser-format RSS archives in place. It builds on XMLFilter. (Speaking of which, thanks to Mark Pilgrim for its recent mention in his b-links.)

The module can also be used an RSS parser for valid XML feeds, though it trades in ultra-liberal parsing for its ability to safely modify files.

Operations such as inserting, modifying, or deleting a post are designed to cause minimal disruption to the rest of the file.

Read more and download.

Here’s a way to back up iPhoto’s image comments into an easy-to-read flat directory structure. (Translation: one big folder.) You’d want to do this when archiving your photos to CD or DVD, or when trying to merge photo libraries, or when leaving iPhoto for another program, or at any other time you want your comments saved in a non-proprietary, easily readable format.

As you may have read last week, when I upgraded to iPhoto 4, all the image descriptions temporarily disappeared from my online photo albums. (I caught the problem on my own staging server before it appeared on this site.) The culprit was a change in the way iPhoto stores photo comments. Comments are now entirely gone from the easy-to-parse AlbumData.xml file; iPhoto now stores them in a binary format that appears to be proprietary.

AppleScript to the rescue. Last week’s script saved the comments to text files and generated a directory structure that exactly paralleled iPhoto’s library, with one text file for each comment. These files were in folders for each day, which were in turn inside folders for each month, etc., guaranteeing there would be no name conflicts. I had rejected using the internal ID of each picture (which would have allowed a flat conflict-free directory structure) because the ID wasn’t user-visible anywhere in the iPhoto interface, making comment files named for the ID difficult to map back to the original pictures.

One of the comments on that post asked for a version that generated the comment files in one folder, based on the image’s filename. That was a good idea. Though the filename is not guaranteed to be unique, it often is in practice. Most digital cameras save unique serial numbers for each picture as part of the filename. So this is enough for most people. (The exceptions would be if you have more than one digital camera using a similar naming convention, or if your camera is configured to reset its numbering between rolls.)

If you like guaranteed accuracy, use my original script; if you like simplicity, use the following alternate script. It will only save one of the conflicting comments if photo filenames are duplicated. Dropping the parallel folder structure simplified the script, since this version doesn’t need to employ any POSIX path manipulation.

Copy the following into Script Editor and run. Tested with iPhoto 4.0 on Mac OS X 10.3. (It may also work with earlier versions; drop me a comment below if you’ve tried it.)

I’m now using the release WordPress 1.0 to generate the content area of this weblog. (The headers, footers, site navigation, and subscription list are generated by ShearerSite.)

In many ways, it’s going from one extreme to the other. My own system is based on static rendering without a database, to the point that the original data itself is kept in RSS-compliant XML files on the site, and HTML files are generated from those. So there’s no programmatic server overhead for retrieval, but there is for authoring, since all the dependent pages have to be re-rendered on the spot. I’m still a fan of this type of system, but I wanted to try something different. WordPress is about as different as you can get: by default, it runs a battery of regular expressions–dozens upon dozens of them–over each post to format it at retrieval time. (Some kind of static caching may be on its way, though, judging from hints in the database schema.) The administration interface is mostly very good, making it much easier to perform administration tasks such as adding new categories than my homegrown config-file-based system did.

Pros of WordPress: very hackable (the good way, by the site owner); terrific setup routines; good navigation controls, easy to set up; well-rounded feature set.

Cons: frequently passes HTML through finicky regular expressions; too much use of addslashes() for my taste, including some double applications; a few bugs in 1.0 (though, to be fair, 1.0.1 final is imminent).

Some changes I made to my own copy include:

• Improvements for source code posting, as well as XHTML validity. Made some changes in the regular expressions in the wptexturize and wpautop filters. Unmodified, they kept turning some my posts into invalid XHTML by adding an extra </p> tag. I also had some problems with snippets of source code that I posted. WordPress’s filters would get too smart, and try to produce curly quotes around strings, as well as em dashes before AppleScript comments. They would also tend to double-space the code, because newlines were turned into <br /> and a newline by wpautop, and the pre element honors both. I modified the code so that any filter could (optionally) avoid <pre> sections in the content, letting them go through unmodified. I did this using a loop and, much as I hated to add them, two more regular expressions.
• Site-relative blog home page links, to handle my unorthodox split-directory setup.
• Minor permalink change, to send out two-digit days and months.
• RSS import and synchronization. (I already contributed my RSS 0.9/1.0/2.0 import and sync. code to the WordPress project, but it was far too near the 1.0 series’ release date to make it in.)

I bought the upgrade to the Apple’s iLife suite, released on Friday. Here’s a gotcha for developers who parse iPhoto’s AlbumData.xml file, though it doesn’t directly affect most users. It affects me, because my own code parses AlbumData.xml to generate my web-based photo albums (such as the England trip pictures I just posted).

Though the overall format of iPhoto’s XML file stays the same (and my script had no trouble reading it), the Comments and Date fields are gone! The Date field is renamed and in a different format, which is no problem to work around because the image file’s embedded EXIF data contains the date as well. The missing Comments field is a different story.

From my quick inspection, the comment data seems to be only stored in a newly introduced iPhoto.db file, which is in some binary format. The rationale for this is presumably performance, but that doesn’t completely make sense, since the photo title is still stored in the XML file and it may be changed just as often.

In any case, here’s a workaround that uses AppleScript to write a parallel folder structure holding just the comments, one per text file. Paste the following into a Script Editor window and run. Use this anytime you’d like to protect your comments from the vagaries of software or platform transitions or upgrades. (The parallel folder structure helps this; the script could have used iPhoto’s internal IDs and generated all the files in a single folder, but that wouldn’t have been as forward-compatible.) GPL-licensed.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m giving WordPress a spin, replacing my own experimental statically-generated weblog publishing tool. The homegrown system worked well, but I wanted to add more dynamic features such as comments and trackbacks, and there’s so much other work going on with weblogging tools that it wasn’t a good use of time to implement those myself.

So I made some changes to WordPress to make it fit my publishing system, all of which are to be contributed back to the project.

1. There is now an importer for RSS files and blogBrowser-style archives of RSS feeds (one folder per year, one RSS file per month). This allowed me to import entries from my own weblogging tool, which uses blogBrowser archives as its native data format. The importer supports multiple categories as well as modification dates, which brings me to:
2. Modification dates. They’re now stored per post, and exported in the RSS feed, using a dcterms:modified element.
3. UTF-8 Unicode storage of all posts. Minimal changes to the code; it mainly sets the right HTTP headers on the edit and post display pages and passes through the results without messing it up. Though PHP is still ISO-8859-1-centric in its string handling (and, the mbstring module aside, some of the other Unicode “support” just ends up replacing characters outside this set with question marks), it passes UTF-8 through fine.
4. A few minor fixes (permalink generation from a custom format now works when the weblog is hosted somewhere below the root of the site; it’s possible to have a post in no categories).
5. Multi-weblog synchronization. This is a consequence of the RSS import and modification date features. I can tie my production and staging servers together and update posts in both directions. (I’m just starting to test this out.)

To continue on the recent image resizing theme (probably of interest to Python scripters only), I made some changes as a result of upgrading to Panther last week. I wanted to use the new built-in Mac OS X version of Python 2.3 (plus the MacPython Extras from Jack Jansen—thanks, Jack!). But a problem with the initial Package Manger distribution of the Python Imaging Library made me look at a new Panther feature that let Python scripts use the native Quartz graphics library directly. (The hitch with PIL was that it was built to require a Fink install of libjpeg for full JPEG support. A quick compile of libjpeg and placement of it and its headers into Fink’s preferred locations didn’t work, and either installing Fink or compiling PIL from source would have taken a while.)

That was as good a reason as any to explore Panther’s new Quartz scripting feature. So I read what I could find on Quartz, and modified my photo album code to use Quartz if available. It still uses PIL to gather EXIF and size information, which works even without libjpeg, but then it uses Quartz to manipulate the actual image content.

The results were terrific, mostly. In real-world testing on an 800 MHz PowerBook G4, the PIL-only version spat out 8 JPEGs per minute, and the Quartz version spat out 65 JPEGs per minute. That’s a welcome improvement, especially when you multiply my typical batch of 100 photos by 3 sizes apiece.

The one problem is that I don’t yet know how to set the quality level. There’s a parameter that should contain this number, but as far as I can tell it isn’t documented anywhere. All of the supplied examples save as PNG or PDF, rather than JPEG, and the function isn’t documented along with the rest of Quartz because it’s not a real Quartz function—the release notes say that image export is actually handled through QuickTime. (This will be the first public mention in the history of the world, as far as Google is concerned, of the Core Graphics function that the API summary says it calls: CGBitmapContextWriteToFile. The last parameter, vaguely named “params” and defaulting to a zero-length string, is where a data structure including the quality level would obviously go.)

So for now it’s using a default JPEG quality level, which, whatever it is, is noticeably worse than the quality=90 setting I used with PIL, especially on thumbnails. Though I haven’t done a controlled side-by-side test, it seemed that lower quality levels resulted in some low-frequency blurriness, which looked much less objectionable than the high-frequency ringing (making macroblock boundaries visible) that PIL tended to show. It looked bad enough that I couldn’t really run PIL with anything below quality=90. And because of the lower quality setting, the file sizes on the Quartz side were half that of the PIL versions.

Here’s all the code the deals with Quartz in the new photo album. newImagesInfo holds a list of destination file paths and pre-calculated pixel dimensions.

def resizeImagesQuartz(origFilename, newImagesInfo):
    # newImagesInfo is a list of
    # (newFilename, newWidth, newHeight) tuples
    if not newImagesInfo: return
    import CoreGraphics
    origImage = CoreGraphics.CGImageCreateWithJPEGDataProvider(
        CoreGraphics.CGDataProviderCreateWithFilename(origFilename),
        [0,1,0,1,0,1], 1, CoreGraphics.kCGRenderingIntentDefault)
    for newFilename, newWidth, newHeight in newImagesInfo:
        print "Resizing image with Quartz: ", newFilename, 
            newWidth, newHeight
        cs = CoreGraphics.CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB()
        c = CoreGraphics.CGBitmapContextCreateWithColor(
            newWidth, newHeight, cs, (0,0,0,0))
        c.setInterpolationQuality(CoreGraphics.kCGInterpolationHigh)
        newRect = CoreGraphics.CGRectMake(0, 0, newWidth, newHeight)
        c.drawImage(newRect, origImage)
        c.writeToFile(newFilename, CoreGraphics.kCGImageFormatJPEG)
            # final params parameter?

If you’re on a Panther machine with the Developer Tools installed, you can find the examples I started with in:

/Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python/

Seems obvious where they would be in retrospect. Thanks to the folks on the MacPython channel in iChat for pointing me to them.

My XMLFilter package was mentioned in Uche Ogbuji’s latest Python XML article on xml.com:

XMLFilter is one of those great examples of a unglamorous but extremely valuable program. Based on its description (and I expect to try it out and report on it in this column soon), it is a must-have for anyone building SAX programs. It provides a fallback SAX parser/driver to avoid SAXReaderNotAvailable errors that users encounter on some platforms. It also offers a safety net against the XMLGenerator bug that bit me earlier in this series. Its main feature, however, is a framework for SAX filters. See Andrew Shearer’s announcement.

Thanks, Uche!

A few days ago, I made changes to my photo album software. Now all current and past photo albums have an optional “large” size with double the pixel count, preserving more detail for users with large screens.

(There are also some other minor improvements, such as a photo count for each album, links to the next and previous albums by date, and more links to related sites.)

Tim Bray is looking for a better way to post photos to his web site. To judge from the sample photo, his current method doesn’t antialias the image, so sharp edges in the original look jagged when reduced in size.

I went through the same thing with iPhoto, which has an HTML Export feature that is similarly broken—it doesn’t antialias at all. It’s a strange limitation, considering that the Mac OS X graphics system has fast, high-quality antialiasing everywhere else, including fonts and Dock icons. It’s as if Apple turned off a global switch in iPhoto for better performance when displaying large number of images onscreen, but forgot to turn it back on for HTML exporting, where quality should count for much more.

In any case, the quality of iPhoto’s exports was poor, so I wrote a Python script to handle the export using the Python Imaging Library. (Contact me if you’d like the code. So far, I’ve publicly released only the general-purpose plist parser that I wrote to handle the AlbumData.xml file.)

The script reads the titles and comments assigned in iPhoto, and parses them for category and other tagging information I’ve appended to the comments. Then it generates date-based and category-based HTML page hierarchies for all the albums whose names start with “Web-”, and generates any thumbnails or medium-sized images that are missing.

The Python Imaging Library, or PIL, is very easy to install with MacPython 2.3’s Package Manager.

There are some drawbacks, though:

• I had to push the JPEG quality setting very high to avoid obvious macro-blocking (squares showing up around detailed areas), and pushing the quality any higher caused PIL to fail by throwing an exception.
• The BICUBIC setting for image reduction didn’t appear to work at all. The image ended up non-antialiased, the same as Photoshop’s “Nearest Neighbor” setting. Only ANTIALIASED had any effect. This may result in bilinear instead of bicubic interpolation, but the documentation isn’t clear.
• The Thumbnail setting produces an image quickly, but they are very low-quality.
• The Progressive setting for JPEGs seemed to cause even more exceptions when trying to save at high quality levels, so I was forced not to use it.
• It’s not nearly as fast as Mac OS X’s Core Graphics image reduction. But then again, I wouldn’t expect it to be.

On the positive side, the antialiasing looks good, and PIL can also read embedded EXIF data. Images that I’ve tagged as deserving more info automatically get the aperture and shutter speed printed on the page.

The code for actually reducing and saving the image, ignoring the EXIF and album manipulations for now, is as simple as this:

if not os.path.exists(newPath):
    shrunkImage = im.resize(size, resample = PIL.Image.ANTIALIAS)
    shrunkImage.save(newPath, 'JPEG', quality = 90)

You can see samples in my Pictures section. Check out the first batch of Providence photos for some night examples with shutter speeds and apertures shown, and the Providence and Boston kayaking photos for examples of pictures with lots of edges that would have looked much worse without antialiasing.

HTMLFilter, in its first public standalone release, is a module for Python programs. It parses an HTML 4 document, allowing subclasses to pass through or modify the the text and tags as they go by. The resulting copy will be an otherwise exact replica of the original, including whitespace and comments. ASP, PHP, JSP, or other server-side code will generally survive the round trip. (The only exception is if the code is embedded inside an HTML tag you’re actually modifying, not just passing through, and in most cases any tag attributes not explicitly modified are safe.)

The use can be as simple as adding a <meta> tag to an existing web page without disturbing the rest, or as complex as merging two HTML pages (as it’s used in ShearerSite, which intelligently merges content pages into template pages).

You can also use it to generate HTML from scratch, with HTMLFilter taking care of the attribute encoding for tags.

HTMLFilter. Python-licensed. Unicode and encoding-savvy. Tested with Python 1.5.2 through 2.3.