Gavin Panella

Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

Google Sitemap Gen v1.4 ebuild

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It’s over a year since it was released, but for Gentoo users, I’ve posted an ebuild for version 1.4 of the Google Sitemap Generator in my Portage overlay. You’ll find it at www-misc/goog-sitemapgen.

In other news, I want to apologise for my content-free blatherings about the Apple iPhone. I don’t think anyone reads this blog so I’m talking to myself, but I want to make my contrition public even so, for future readers :-)

Written by Gavin Panella

February 1st, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Expire Junk script

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Here is a small Python script to expire junk mail in an IMAP mailbox.

Apple Mail can automatically delete old junk mail, but I also use KMail and SquirrelMail, and it’s often a long wait between the times I load up Mail, so I need something else. It requires Python 2.4 (perhaps earlier, but I’ve not tried it), and that’s it. Run it with a --help to get started.

Incidentally, the script is also in a Bazaar repository, and you can branch it if you want:

bzr branch \

http://www.premolo.net/~gavin/Scripts

Right now the script doesn’t care about SSL (I run it on the same box as my Courier IMAP server) and it uses CRAM-MD5 authentication which may not be to your taste. It’s not had a lot of testing either, so be careful, and take some backups first :-) It’s in the public domain though, so happy hacking, and I’m more than willing to merge patches.

Written by Gavin Panella

January 31st, 2007 at 10:07 pm

Premolo packages available from PyPI

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In the last few days I’ve posted the Premolo packages to the Python Package Index, or PyPI. Source distributions and Eggs are available.

The easiest way to install, say Alfie, is to use easy_install from setuptools:

easy_install premolo-alfie

I’ll be adding in script support for running Alfie from the command line, but in the meantime you can use this slightly unwieldy incantation:

python -c 'from premolo.alfie import template; from sys import argv; template.main(*argv[1:])'

I’m working mostly on Alfie at the moment, and hoping to get a 1.0 release out the door in the first quarter of 2007.

Written by Gavin Panella

January 6th, 2007 at 12:13 pm

Why I won’t be using MySQL for my next project

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The world’s most popular database is also the VHS of databases. It gets the job done, but the picture is grainy, the sound wows in and out, and it gets jammed once in a while. That’s what I found out on a recent project with MySQL 4.1.

First, some context.

I recently launched a dating website for Luxembourg. “Oh no!” you scream, “Not another bleedin’ dating website!”. No apologies though; Luxembourg needs some loving, and I was the man for the job.

Read the rest of this entry »

Written by Gavin Panella

October 15th, 2006 at 11:10 am