If you get a UnicodeDecodeError from the cc.engine (you'll see this if it's
running in the foreground) when you try to access the http://host:9080/license/
then it's likely that the install of python you are using is set to use ASCII
as it's default output.  You can change this to UTF-8 by creating the file
/usr/lib/python<version>/sitecustomize.py and adding these lines:
  import sys
  sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

This always struck me as a bit inelegant—having to muck with something outside my application directory. After all, this belief that the application should be self-contained is the reason I use zc.buildout and share Jim’s belief in the evil of the system Python. Like a lot of inelegant things, though, it never rose quite to the level of annoyance needed to motivate me to do it right.

Today I was working on moving the license engine to a different server² and ran into this problem again. I decided to dig in and see if I could track it down. In fact I did track down the initial problem—I was making a comparison between an encoded Unicode string and without specifying an explicit codec to use for the decode. Unfortunately once I fixed that I found it was turtles all the way down.

Turns out the default Zope 3 page template machinery uses StringIO to collect the output. StringIO uses, uh, strings—strings with the default system encoding. Reading the module documentation, it would appear that mixing String and Unicode input in your StringIO will cause this sort of issue.

Andres suggested marking my templates as UTF-8 XML using something like:

 < ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

but even after doing this and fixing the resulting entity errors, there’s still obviously some 8 bit Strings leaking into the output. In conversations on IRC the question was then asked: “is there a reason you don’t want a reasonable system wide encoding if your locale can support it?”

I guess not³.

UPDATE Martijn has a tangentially related post which sheds some light on why Python does/should ship with ascii as the default codec. At least people smarter than me have problems with this sort of thing, too.

¹ Yes, I may be a bit biased—I wrote the Zope3/Grok implementation. Of course, I wrote the previous implementation, too, and I can say without a doubt it was… “sub-optimal”.

² We’re doing a lot of shuffling lately to complete a 32 to 64 bit conversion; see the CC Labs blog post for the harrowing details.

³ So the warning remains.

I drove the Nerd Van (myself, Asheesh and the interns) to Google.

I’m still recovering (and inflicting pain—CC board meeting today) and collecting feedback, but I think it was a really successful day. We learned some things we’ll do differently next time (yes, there will be a next time). Anyway, special recognition to the CC interns for live blogging the event and for generally doing anything asked of them. I feel like I should write more about the event, but I’m feeling pretty brain dead at the moment.

Someday I’ll write up my thoughts on distributed version control and “convention versus configuration”, which seem to overlap in this deployment. But not today.

So I’m trying something a little different. This evening I watched the Google Tech Talk by Merlin Mann on Inbox Zero. While the second half played I managed to clear out my yergler.net inbox.

Tomorrow I’m planning to create an email DMZ and begin at zero with my work inbox. Just keeping the flow of information to a reasonable level is just the first step, though.

I’ve had a Remember the Milk (RTM) account for quite a while but never got in the habit of using it. After watching an introduction to Tasque, I decided to look again. Tasque is a simple task list application for Gnome, in the same vein as Tomboy for notes. I love Tomboy. I think I’ll love Tasque, too.

I don’t know if the RTM elves have been hacking away at the site since I last looked or if I just never really dug in, but it actually seems to have the features I want in a task list. And there’s even a handy blog post on how you can use RTM to GTD (get things done).

Finally, the piece that ties both sides together: their Firefox extension. My workflow this evening looked like this:

1. Go to the next email
2. Decide that had some action associated with it
3. Add the action label to it, which also created it as a task to RTM
4. Later, when skimming through the action list I saw one I could knock out in a few minutes. And when I finished and removed the action label, the task in RTM was marked as complete. Sweet.

OpenWeb Vancouver is a community run conference, much like PyCon. And much like PyCon it looks like it has a really great value proposition (unfortunately much like PyCon it also seems to have crappy wifi... sigh).

I’ll post slides soon (read: when I actually write them).

I thought the talk went well. For once even though I talked too fast I had enough content to fill the time. Usually I talk too fast and run way under. And it felt like I had a good idea what the “story” was I was trying to tell, so that made it easier to put everything together. Putting the talk together reminded me that I’ve been really insanely lucky; for the past six years of my life, I’ve been at jobs where I’m paid to either consume or develop (or both) open source software. That beats the hell out of MCSE bullshit¹.

Slides, links, etc available here.

¹ In my humble opinion, of course.