Hacked on XDot, which uses PyGtk/Cairo and the xdot intermediate format and thus sidesteps the limitations I encoutered working on dotviewer. My changes are in a Git branch created with git-svn. Get it here:

git clone http://mg.pov.lt/xdot-mg.git

Try it out

cd xdot-mg
./xdot.py sample2.dot

See the changes

gitk --all

Overview:

• Supports more .dot features.
• Nicer node rendering.
• Animated jumping between nodes.
• Highlights node/edge under mouse.
• Ctrl-drag zooms.
• Shift-drag zooms an area.
• File open dialog.
• Zoom-to-fit reacts to window resize.

I must admit that git is nicer than bzr to work with, but a bit of a pain when you want to publish or share your changes.

I will not be sprinting tomorrow.

Hacked on dotviewer that was developed for PyPy but is now a standalone tool. My changes are in a Bazaar branch created with bzr-svn. Get it here:

bzr get http://mg.pov.lt/dotviewer-mg/

Try it out

cd dotviewer-mg
./dotviewer.py sample2.dot

See the changes

bzr vis

Overview:

• Supports more .dot features.
• Nicer node highlighting.
• Easier panning for one-mouse-button users (Shift+drag).
• Better edge navigation close to the borders of the graph.
• Renders small fonts too.

Then I hit some limitations: it's either impossible or very hard to get pretty anti-aliased output or smooth text scaling with Pygame. It's impossible to support all dot features using the plain intermediate format.

Highlights from EuroPython 2008:

• Nice badges! Large, readable font, nice design, pretty logo, no clutter.
• Wifi worked great most of the time.
• Reportlab paragraph hyphenation is in a sorry state (nothing in the core, several extensions that sort of support it but are incomplete or hard to integrate); I should take a closer look at Dinu Gherman's work.
• I should take a closer look at Vudo.
• Phatch is cool.
• Capistrano is interesting (and the slides were very pretty); shame I missed most of the talk. It was recorded, so hopefully I'll get a chance to see it.
• Eggs and zc.buildout are getting traction despite their rough edges.
• The Asus EeePC is convenient at conferences, if there are enough power sockets around, or if you're careful and suspend it often.

Won a Wing IDE licence in the raffle. Not going to use it myself (vim is the best, and I should publish my plugins). Also, I avoid closed-source software when I can.

Mango Lassi is a GNOME program that lets you painlessly share keyboard & mouse (& clipboard too!) between computers. It's not packaged for Ubuntu yet so you have to build it from sources.

Big fat warning: Mango Lassi has no authentication and does no encryption, so use it with extreme care. Don't type any passwords over your unsecured WiFi network!

Here's how to get it working on Ubuntu Hardy:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core curl build-essential intltool \
    automake-1.9 libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxtst-dev \
    libavahi-glib-dev libavahi-client-dev libavahi-ui-dev \
    libnotify-dev libglade2-dev
$ git clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/mango-lassi.git/
$ cd mango-lassi
$ ./bootstrap.sh

Press Enter once at the prompt.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Now you can run it with

$ mango-lassi

When you're tired of it, go back to the source tree and type

This is a continuation of Python object graphs.

My post on hunting memory leaks in Python received a lot of feedback via email. And both^H^H^H^H most of them asked for the source code.

At work the functional test suite of our application used up quite a lot of RAM (over 500 megs). For a long time it was cheaper to buy the developers an extra gig of RAM than to spend time hunting down a possible memory leak, but finally curiosity overcame me and I started investigating.