Undistract-me will notify you

Yesterday I came across a short article in WebUpd8 about this little tool called undistract-me. It will alerts you when long-running commands finally complete.

In ubuntu the installation is as simple as this:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:undistract-me-packagers/daily
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install undistract-me

Few more steps are needed in order to set it up in one of your terminal's profile.
In Terminal open Edit->Profile Preferences:

In Terminal open Edit->Profile Preferences:

In 'Title and Command tab' check 'Run command as a login shell'.

In 'Title and Command tab' check 'Run command as a login shell'.

Quit all terminal windows. That's all.
It's time to test it.
In a terminal window run 'sleep 11'. After 11 seconds you should see a notification that says „Long command completed“, „ „sleep 11“ took 11 seconds“.

Different ways for low level caching in Django

Often in a Django projects complex data processing can be involved in order to get desire output. It can be a good idea to use some kind of caching. Django provides a robust cache system. It's possible to store and retrieve wide range of data with different level of complexity.
Most easiest ways to use caching is to use:

• per-site cache for the entire site.
• per-view cache for caching the output of individual views

But I'm more interested in mixing two other types of caching:

• the low-level cache
• template fragment caching
  

Trivial examples of them can be found at Caching websites with Django and Memcached…
But what if on the one hand we have some complex python code which give us a complex output (like dict, or list of dicts, or something like this) and on the other hand this complex output is used in the template for another complex work (e.g., building table with many dependencies).
How to deal with such cases?

Just use both of them

That is, complex output is cached in the python code and there is cached fragment in the template.
Pros: simple enough
Cons: if the cache key used in the python code is expired, the complex calculation will be made in order to get the complex result. But the key used for template fragment might haven't expired, so the efforts are wasted.

Do the hard work, only if it's needed

Not only the key used in the python code should be checked, but also the one generated for the cached template fragment. If the last one is not expired, the hard work can be skipped.

Pros: complex calculations are performed only when they are really needed
Cons: additional code is needed in order to generate same key as the one used by {% cache %} template tag. There is no guarantee that this key will be generated in the same way in the next Django version.

Cache only the final result

Save your template fragment that should be cached in separate template file. When you get your complex output form your hard calculations use render_to_string to get desire result and put it in the cache. The result is string, which can be used 'as is' in the template.

I will be glad to hear your opinion on the topic.

Python script to toggle Skype main window with keyboard

I spent some time searching for some way to toggle skype's main window with keyboard shortcut.
But there is no way to do it with anything out of the box.
Finally found a really useful python script. You can read more at scorpspot.blogspot.com.

At least one field of the form is required

Suppose we have a form to collect user data and three of the fields are for contact details - mail, phone and fax. We want users to fill with valid data at least one of them. In other words they must have required=False and their validation should be done both in clean_FIELDNAME() and clean(). Usually in order to check whether a field has a fair value, we check in cleaned_data keys. But these fields are not mandatory and they always will be present in cleaned_data, even when they are empty. Therefore we need to verify not only the keys but also the values. I propose the following simple solution:

clnd_data = super(MyForm, self).clean()
cnts = ['email','phone','fax']
if not [k for k in cnts if clnd_data.get(k, '').strip()]:
    raise forms.ValidationError(_(u'Please enter at least one.'))
return clnd_data

Ilian proposed different approach:

clnd_data = super(MyForm, self).clean()
cnts = ['email','phone','fax']
if any([f for f in cnts if clnd_data.get(f, None)]):
    return clnd_data
else:
   raise forms.ValidationError(_('Please ...'))

Having global variable in your django templates

This post is based on question in stackoverflow.com
The question is about having 'now' in blocktrans.
In blocktrans we can't use templatetags so we will assign result of the templatetags to a variable, like this:
 {% url "add_account" as add_account_url %}

But 'now' doesn't act the same way.

SSH login without password

Too often I have to login on different server over ssh in order to do my daily duties.
If you are using PuTTY on Windows you can pass your login credentials in command line. In such way you can create a shortcut and skip the login process.
ssh does not have such command line option, but you can achieve the same effect with few simple steps.

openssl_sign in python

You need to sign something with private RSA key. You have some documentation or make your google search about subject.  And all excamples are with PHP function openssl_sign.

But we don't eat PHP anymore. So let's translate few lines PHP into something better, like Python.