* for the record, my steampunk goggles were bought off of Etsy.

element(attribute=value):

    #comment

    subelement:"text node"

    anothersub:"""

                Python-style 'here' doc.

    """

generates:

<element attribute=value>

<!--comment-->

	<subelement>

		text node

	</subelement>

	<anothersub>

		Python-style 'here' doc.

	</anothersub>

</element>

Like Markdown, you can use it as a BBEdit filter.

• Download and expand the archive file.
• Copy sliplib.py and sliptokenizer.py into /Library/Python/2.3.
• Copy slip2xml.py into ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters.

But anyone can walk up, hand $10 to a hosting company, and start serving PHP + MySQL applications. If you want to run Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else, you need to use CGI or a dedicated and more expensive server.

Not to knock those other languages (and I’d like to do some projects in Ruby or Python,) but until Mod_(Perl|Python|Ruby) becomes as common as PHP in hosting packages, people are going to build their applications using PHP.

“Oooh, this one does ringtones,” I exclaim. C laughs and says she’ll have to get a Kare Kano ringtone for it. Hah! It’s a challenge. We’ll need to:

1. Find a source file.
2. Convert the source file to a ringtone.
3. Get the ringtone onto C’s phone.

Finding a Source File

First, searching Google for “Kare Kano ringtone” is a non-starter. Search terms like “ringtones” brings up a lot of absolute crud. I have a little more luck searching on “Tenshi no Yubikiri ringtone”. This brings up a site of MIDI files, including “Tenshi no Yubikiri”.

The LG phones can use MIDI files for ringtones. So we have the first two steps out of the way.

Getting the Ringtone onto the Phone

More googling brings up a page for the Sourceforge project Bitpim. This application lets you mount your phone’s file system and add/change wallpapers and ringtones. And there’s installers for Windows, Mac OS 10.3, and Linux.

As a bonus, Bitpim’s developer maintains a VX 4400 FAQ with useful information on getting around the ‘walled garden’ of MSN’s gateway on mobile browsers. The VX 4400 and my Motorola phone both use the Open Wave browser, so I was able to ‘update’ my phone. It’s not a secure link, but I’m in control. Of course, now I have to relearn WML.

Hardware

All we need now is a cable. Windows people can use the straight USB cable. On the Mac, I’d need the Serial to USB cable. Alan Pinstein already found the right cable for us at Radio Shack.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

From that list, mod_murka looks neat. It looks for a cached HTML version of the request URI, and if it’s not found, looks for the .xml file, transforms it using whatever stylesheet’s mentioned in the file’s processing instruction, and caches the result.

When you’re installing the Leo scripts, I found that you shouldn’t rename $LEO_HOME/leo.py to $LEO_HOME/leo.pyw, as the instructions say, because it will break the imports. The wrapper script for wpython will take care of executing leo.py with the right Python interpreter.

I used Ultraseek back at EPRI in the late 1990′s, and was impressed with the ample hooks for customizing it through Python.

Since I worked with it last, Ultraseek has been updated to consume and index PDFs, Office documents, and XML.

* Verity bought Ultraseek from Inktomi last year. Inktomi bought it from Disney.

But how do you handle broken XML in the literals?

I’m still looking at Bento, and thinking about implementing it with XSLT.

I also want to get back into Python.