python-route53 feedback wanted

Late last night (or early this morning), I finished the draft ofpython-route53, a stand-alone Route 53 module with Python 3.x and Python 2.7 compatibility. Route 53 is an excellent DNS service offered by Amazon Web Services. It exposes everything through an API.

My intentions with python-route53 are two-fold:

• There were no Python 3 compatible Route 53 modules that I knew of. I had a need for one.
• I didn’t feel like any of the existing Route 53 modules were as simple and easy-to-use as they could be.

What I’d like to do is reach out and get some feedback on whether I have succeeded or not in both regards. I’d like to get a packaged release out later this week, but hoped to get some eyeballs on the documentation and the source before it lands on PyPi.

If you’d like to take a look, see the python-route53 documentation and the project at Github. Feel free to leave issues on the issue tracker with feedback, or tweet at me.

Evennia MUD server gets BSD’d

As of a few days ago, the Evennia MUD server has been re-licensedunder the BSD License. We feel like this will knock down another barrier for those considering running a game with Evennia. I can’t recommend this codebase enough for anyone who may have caught the MUD development itch (hey, they still exist!). Griatch has been doing an awesome job making improvements and building a community.

Evennia is an advanced Python+Django MUD server, with all sorts of goodies (like a web-based client). While the project has been going on for a number of years, the community has been growing a bit faster over the last year or two. We hope this will help continue that trend.

Feel free to stop by #evennia on FreeNode IRC to lurk, hang out, or ask questions.

python-fedex and colormath re-licensed under BSD

I am happy to announce that python-fedex and python-colormath havebeen re-licensed under the BSD License. At the time these two packages were created, there were reasons for GPL’ing these. However, said reasons have long since been removed, so it’s BSD time!

My involvement with both of these projects has been minimal since I joined DUO Interactive, since we don’t have a use for either. However, my hope is that a more permissive license will encourage contributions. I still review pull requests for both of these when they appear, and would be very much open to capable individuals taking over maintainership of either.

python-bluefin 1.3 released

python-bluefin 1.3 has been released, now with improved errorhandling. The major feature in this release is that we have smoothed over some inconsistencies in Bluefin’s error handling.

Instead of setting an HTTP status code indicating an error like they do for most of the Bluefin API errors, we get an HTTP 200 back, and a rarely used attribute in the response contains an error flag, with another rarely used attribute containing a cryptic error message. Since you need to handle invalid credit card numbers and authorization failures gracefully, we now return a different exception (that still inherits from what was previously returned). We also provide a more friendly error message for the authorization-related errors, that are not user-friendly, or human-friendly.

Of course, you can still access the original exception message through Exception.raw_message. See the changelog for full details.

This release is backwards compatible, it’ll just give you better granularity in your error handling.

Get it from the PyPi page, or by installing ‘bluefin’ from pip/easy_install.

python-bluefin 1.2 released, sans urllib2

python-bluefin 1.2 has been released. python-bluefin is a very thinwrapper around the Bluefin payment gateway’s API. The two major changes are:

• urllib2 has been removed, with the excellent requests taking its place.
• We now check directmode’s status_code for known failure codes and raise exceptions based on what we find. Previously, no exception was raised, which would result in a silent failure if you weren’t looking at status_code yourself.

To install, either easy_install/pip install bluefin, or download directly from its PyPi page.