Leap On!

I feel that this is the right time to expand the wings of my web development skill beyond Drupal, and so I have been looking for a right framework to work on.

Python-based frameworks

Please note that I have very little experience with python, so my opinion here might differ with pythonic (or anti-pythonic) zealots. I gained most of the information here by browsing and reading the documentation of numerous projects, so my view is more-or-less a layman's or newcomer's.

The python language has garnered quite an interest for me: simple and intuitive, pseudocode-like feel, very high level, general-purpose, embraced by open source community. Much better than PHP, IMHO.

The state of web development in python, however, is somewhat disappointing. There are several major frameworks competing in different levels of service, confusing new users and fragmenting the community. Read more »

Yup, judul di atas tidak salah. Melalui Google App Engine, Google menawarkan bandwidth, database, dan penyimpanan file secara gratis. Layanan tersebut masih berupa preview, sehingga tidak semua orang dapat mencicipinya sekarang – saya juga masih menunggu dibuatkan account oleh Google.

Website Anda akan menggunakan server performa tinggi milik Google sehingga tidak perlu lagi susah-susah membayar hosting lagi jika website Anda tidak melebihi batas, yaitu disk space sebesar 500 MB dan “bandwidth yang cukup untuk 5 juta pageview (tampilan halaman) per bulan” (angka matinya 10GB). Kebutuhan bandwidth atau space tambahan dapat dibeli dari Google (walaupun dalam edisi preview, hal ini belum bisa dilakukan). Jumlah ini SANGAT BANYAK untuk web hosting gratis. Sebagai perbandingan, blog ini hanya menggunakan space sekitar 40 MB dan bandwidth tidak sampai 1 GB per bulan.

Website yang dibuat dengan layanan ini dapat menggunakan nama domain sendiri seperti leapon.net, atau dapat menggunakan subdomain gratis di bawah appspot.com (misalnya leon.appspot.com). Read more »

Python is a simple yet powerful programming language, and it is one of my favorite. Add to the fact that it has the powerful modules that focuses on providing the necessary utility functions to make a game!

I want to make exciting playable games, but I don’t think a one-person development can live with C/C++ 3D framework especially if the person is me, so I seek to make 2D games. In Python, at least there are two modules that can be used: pygame and pyglet (can’t they have any name not starting with ‘py’!?!?).

Python is a simple yet powerful programming language, and it is one of my favorite. Add to the fact that it has the powerful modules that focuses on providing the necessary utility functions to make a game!

I want to make exciting playable games, but I don’t think a one-person development can live with C/C++ 3D framework especially if the person is me, so I seek to make 2D games. In Python, at least there are two modules that can be used: pygame and pyglet (can’t they have any name not starting with ‘py’!?!?). Read more »

OpenOffice.org has become more and more suited for replacing Microsoft Office. Sadly, porting lots of Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice format (aka OpenDocument Format) is not easy. If you have only one, five, or ten files you could just open them one by one and resave in OpenOffice.org, but how about hundreds or thousands of multi-megabyte documents in a corporate environment?

This little program batch / mass convert Microsoft Office documents (*.doc, *.xls, and .ppt) to their OpenOffice equivalent (.odt, *.ods, and *.odp (aka OpenDocument Format)). The nice thing about this script is that it converts all documents specified in the input, including subdirectories. The result can be put in another directory, and it retains its original directory structure (the script takes care of keeping the relative path). Use it at your own risk! Read more »

The level of a language has always become an interesting phenomenon. I can see that most young languages tend to “raise” their language level; making it closer to humans (programmers) than to machines. The benefits of a very high level language is of course obvious: programmers code less and become more productive. Most computers todays are fast, and productivity is better than (insignifficant) performance gain in most cases. And up to today… I can see two languages that have top-notch language level: Ruby and Python.

Both Ruby and Python are the most famous all-purpose scripting languages. By all-purpose, I mean it is used to solve diverse and different sets of problems as easy as possible. By scripting, I mean that from coding to execution phase, one does not have to do a compilation phase (at least apparently so). Just from these factors, we can see that all-purpose scripting languages are very high level languages: more closer to natural language than machine language. Read more »