This marks the first beta release of Pydra, a distributed computing framework for python. While most core features are implemented, at least partially, there are many open tickets in the tracker for bugs and improved features. While this is not a stable release we felt the project was far enough along that there should be an installable package out there for people to experiment with. The coming months will bring more stability and features as we transition to a scheduled release cycle.
Many thanks to Jakub Gustak, Yin Qiu, and Almir Karic who have contributed code vital to this release.
Continue reading ‘Pydra 0.5 Released’
We’ve been working on Pydra for more about 6 months now and we’ve come a long way. So where is the project? Pydra is moving closer to a stable release, but there’s a lot to finish. We still expect to have something usable, by most people, by the end of the summer.
There are no releases yet but we’re getting ready to use it in production:
- We’re close to deploying Pydra with the Protein Geometry Project. I’ve been working bugs out of Pydra while implementing their protein data import tool. The main issues are related to the protein parser rather than Pydra itself.
- I’ve also deployed a small cluster of a few blades and other random desktop machines we had lying around. We’re throwing it at the Engine Yard Contest just to try out Pydra. The trial attempts have been good, but this was more about kicking the tires on Pydra than winning the contest.
Myself and most others at the OSL use screen+irssi to keep our irssi sessions alive and move between locations and computers. The problem is that we don”t receive notifications of private messages or highlighted messages (messages directed to us in a channel, or keywords) on our remote machines. The solution I came up with was to send the notifications over XMPP to a jabber server which both the irssi client and notification system could connect to.
Continue reading ‘Irssi Notifications Via XMPP’
The Open Source Lab is organizing a Hackathon (code sprint) at the Open Source Bridge conference, June 17-19th at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. We’re bringing people together to help out Sunlight Lab’s Fifty States Project. If you’re interested in helping promote government openness and transparency, this is your chance.
Continue reading ‘Hackathon @ Open Source Bridge’
Google is going to pay students $4,500 to work on some of the coolest open source projects. The OSU OSL is a organization for Google Summer of Code 2009. After reviewing some great proposals we’ve made our selections. Here are the students and the projects they proposed.
Continue reading ‘Google Summer Of Code 2009′
I’ve been working on the layout for the new Open Source Lab Blogs site, and came across a problem. We wanted our front page to be an aggregation of our individual blogs. It was easy to get the articles aggregated using RSS feeds and FeedWordPress Plugin. It even sorted our articles into categories very nicely, but wasn’t compatible with other category listing plugins. We wanted the article linking back to the source blog, an option provided by FeedWordPress.
I built a category plugin that uses the built in query & display functions to list all posts from a category. It should be compatible with any other plugin that modifies the links for articles.
Continue reading ‘Category Plugin For Wordpress’
SunlightLabs is holding a content called Apps For America to produce new applications that increase government transparency, openness, and accountability. RepresentMe is my entry into the contest.
What
RepresentMe (Repme.org) focuses on how well your representatives and senators represent you. It takes your opinions on bills and issues and compares them to how your elected officials voted. It applies statistics, accounting for how strongly you feel about specific issues and bills. The end result is a detailed breakdown of how well you are being represented.
Continue reading ‘Introducing RepresentMe’
Pydra is a distributed computing or cluster computing framework for Python. Pydra seeks to provide a solution that is easier to deploy, manage, use than existing projects. This is on top of providing standard features such as fault tolerance.
Pydra was born out of a necessity. Other projects being developed by the Open Source Lab required a large amount of processing. Rather than implementing parallelism specific to our application, we chose to build a generic distributed computing framework with the features missing in other solutions. We see Pydra as a useful tool for future projects at the lab.
Continue reading ‘Distributed Computing With Pydra’
If your website generates useful data a great way to propagate it is by providing widgets. A widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page. By providing widgets, owners of other websites can display a small portion of your website, in theirs.
Building widgets is very easy, but building a widget editor and preview tool for each widget can be time consuming. I wanted to build at least a half dozen widgets for RepresentMe so I came up with a Generic Widget Builder. This tool will allow you to easily add new widgets each with their own editor and preview, requiring very little code.
Continue reading ‘Building A Generic Widget Builder’
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites, also called the new media, are becoming a major part of our culture. Facebook alone has 175 million active users. They are a means to reach broad audiences and build enthousiasm.
This tutorial is part 2 of a series that will focus on connecting your existing web application to Facebook. In part 1 we connected your website to a Facebook app. In this post I’ll show you how to update a users status and profile. I’ll be using examples from RepresentMe a project built for the Apps For America contest. This is a standalone webapp that leverages Facebook to deliver its message to a wider audience.
Continue reading ‘Connecting A Web Application To Facebook (part 2)’
