EVE Unified Uploader (market data) open sourced

The author of the EVE Marketeer Uploader has decided to open sourcethe project, which is great news for the EVE community. It appears to have a large amount of traction, this move will guarantee its survival into the future, and allow other people to contribute to the project.

The first few things I can think of tackling are:

• Packging this up for Mac OS. They’ve got a py2exe’d Windows distro, should be easy to do the same for Mac.
• Provide clear instructions for running under Linux. This is probably more of a pointing our requirements, rather than packaging.

Kudos to Bart Riepe for opening this up!

txWS example project

I recently got the itch to check up on WebSockets, and tinker with a fewideas I have been tossing around. Some searching around led me to txWS, which supported a newer version of the spec, and was organized to my liking. The only problem was, it wasn’t immediately apparent how to use it without some prior knowledge of Twisted.

Rooting around in the txWS issue tracker, I found an issue complaining about the lack of a simple example. Someone chimed in with a link to a gist by zed, which contained a very concise and useful sample of how everything fits together.

I figured I’d take the next step and re-organize it to my liking, stick some more comments in, and post up a project for me to base my various tinker projects on. The end result of this is txWS-example-project.

As a result of this mostly being for me, you may or may not like my particular project structure, but hopefully you can still get the basic idea of how to use txWS.

Magnificant MUDdy Musings

The Evennia MUD Server has been progressing through beta at a goodclip, with much effort spent on fine-tuning existing features, and expanding on the already excellent pile of documentation. Much to my delight, the current maintainer, Griatch, has started to blog about Evennia development. If you are at least somewhat interested in keeping an eye on a Python+Twisted+Django MUD server, consider taking a peek at Griatch’s Evennia Musings.

While the blog details Evennia development, there is a lot of valuable general-purpose stuff as well. Especially for those writing, or considering writing, a MUD server using some or all of the same building blocks.

For those who would like to harass the man (or the other users/developers) in person, stop by #evennia on FreeNode.

boto 2.2.2 has arrived

boto 2.2.2 was released this morning, comprised mostly of bug fixes.Of particular interest is the DynamoDB stabilization that has happened over the last few weeks, although a number of other minor bugs were fixed with the other services. For anyone currently running on older versions, we highly recommend upgrading to boto 2.2.2.

If you run into an problems, have questions, or would like to suggest something, hit #boto on FreeNode IRC, the issue tracker, or the mailing list.

django-dynamodb-sessions is ready!

After much tweaking, hand-wringing, and thumping around on staging,django-dynamodb-sessions is ready. The package provides a super-high-scalability session store for those hosting on Amazon’s EC2.

This may be useful to you if…

You’re wanting to trim your DB size, or reduce the read/write thrashing that happens with DB-backed sessions. You also don’t feel like maintaining Redis, or something similar.

With the introduction of Amazon’s DynamoDB, we now have a very fast, massively scalable data store that is somebody else’s problem to secure, update, and keep running. I’ve found the response times to be great, especially when combined with the provided cached_dynamodb backend (similar to Django’s cached_db backend).

This probably isn’t a good option for you if…

• You aren’t hosting on EC2. While it’s still possible to use, YMMV as far as response times go. Within AWS, the response times are excellent.
• You’re not at a big enough scale to find yourself with a ton of django_sessions table bloat, or the previously mentioned read/write thrashing in django_sessions.
• You store massive (>1MB) amounts of data in sessions.

Getting Started

If you’d like to give django-dynamodb-sessions a try, either grab it with your choice of easy_install, pip, or other equivalent, or snag it from its page on PyPi. Install instructions can also be found on the PyPi page.

If you think this is interesting…

Make sure to Watch  the project on GitHub. If there’s enough interest, I’ll continue to tweak and improve the package.