Was trying to get a result set that was semi-random with only three result coming back using sqlobject. I over-engineered my first attempt into a mess, and sat back to think for a while. In the end I came up with:

 def randResultSet():
    resultSet = Table.select()
    count = resultSet.count()
    upper_bound = random.randint(3,count)
    lower_bound = upper_bound - 3;
    return resultSet[lower_bound: upper_bound]

Two very cool things. SQLObject's SelectResults object on the count() function does a quick query with COUNT rather than loading all the results the select() function returned. Which makes the count call cheap.

SQLObject loads the results lazily anyway, only doing the query when you actually want them. When combined with python's splicing this makes a semi-random result set pretty simple. With some fudging of the orderBy argument and reversed() it is random enough for human eyes.

For phoenix eats out I had to do an internal redirect with CherryPy based on the URL that was coming in, but only for the index page. I did it for all other cases in Apache, but decided with the index page to do it using Turbogears.

The main issue, which took me a while to workout, was that I was running CherryPy as a server locally on my dev machine, but in production I am using mod_proxy with apache. CherryPy gives you quick and easy access to the request headers as a dict, so it is easy to punch out and see what is going on. In my dev environment I set up phoenixeatsout.com in my /etc/hosts to resolve to localhost and wrote:

 if cherrypy.request.headers.get("Host") == 'www.phoenixeatsout.com':
    raise cherrypy.InternalRedirect('/restaurants/')

Which worked fine when I was running CherryPy as the http server. With mod_proxy that doesn't work as the host is always localhost:8000 or whatever host and port you are running CherryPy on that Apache connects to through mod_proxy. After pumping out the headers to the main page I changed it in production to:

reqHost = cherrypy.request.headers.get("X-Forwarded-Host")
if reqHost == 'www.phoenixeatsout.com':
    raise cherrypy.InternalRedirect('/restaurants/')

Because it is an internal redirect it slides to that controller without changing the URL to the user's eye. Quite neat.

More And fwiw the point versioning of the South Sea Republic, Cam Riley and Phoenix Eats Out codebase has gone from 1.3.64 to 1.4.0.

I was getting the error while working on adding a new controller method to the Root controller in a Turbogears application:

AttributeError: 'function' object has no attribute 'exposed'

It perplexed me for a while until I realised I had not put @expose above the method. The incorrect method:

def restaurant_random(self, identifier, carryover, **params):
    raise cherrypy.InternalRedirect (path="/restaurants/?random=true")

and the corrected method:

@expose()
def restaurant_random(self, identifier, carryover, **params):
    raise cherrypy.InternalRedirect (path="/restaurants/?random=true")

Like most of these types of errors it was one of omission, and took a while to work out before discovering the simple solution.

Sourceforge's front-end is now running Turbogears. Very cool. Especially in light of this article concerned about the tight coupling with the sourceforge codebase and its descendants.

For what it is worth, my little blog is running on Turbogears. I enjoy working with the framework. I must upgrade to Turbogears 2 so I can get rid of the kid templating system which is too restrictive.

The documentation wants you to upgrade via virtenv. Meh, too much hassle even though my install won't be supported. I did it through easy_install on OSX but there were some package clashes.

 sudo easy_install Turbogears2==2.0.3

That got me a couple of errors that simplejson had to be both 0.9.1 and >= 2.0. I solved that by using easy_install:

 easy_install simplejson==2.0.8

Running the easy_install for Turbogears2 again after that fixed the issue. Sweet. Next job is to update this blog from Turbogears 1.x to Turbogears2.

More: Previously with easy_install and turbogears 1.

More II: Not so quick. Running a Turbogears 2 project required Myghty to be installed.

 easy_install Myghty>=1.1

After that the project loaded and the webserver was running on 8085.

More II Paster requires virtualenv installed.

sudo easy_install virtualenv

sudo easy_install tg.devtools

More To get around the setuptools issue not upgrading on OSX read here.

I updated the ssr/camriley websites to Turbogears 1.1 from Turbogears 1.0. The main benefit was moving from kid templating to genshi which is html based rather than XML though most of the template substitutions seem to be XSLT based.

A couple of side effects from that is that templates end up being dependent on the ultimate parent template and you can't ignore the html/body tags correctly for multiple templates deep. Even with judicious use of py:strip="True" multiple html/body tags appear as does multiple css references.

Another side effect is that Turbogears 1.1.x uses a different sha1 hash than the previous one, so all the passwords are indecipherable. I think only adam and maybe john still log in. Send me an email and I will reset the password. Gilmae might, but knowing him he has already hacked the entire website already and taken care of it himself.