Over the past day or so, I have been making changes to how this web site is deployed. This web site now utilizes virtualenv. Using virtualenv along with pip has allowed for a much easier transition between development and production setups. My development and productions Python environments can now be identical without much of a hassle and different environments can use different versions of similar Python packages; being able to specify dependencies and install them from pypi using pip is also a great feature. This method of deploying Django projects has become fairly common and working with virtualenv has shown me why it is becoming popular.

Also, I have cleaned up the code for this web site a little bit. To help ease pushing updates to the Webfaction servers and as a means of showing what components make up this web site, the code for this web site is now on GitHub at https://github.com/Ryochan7/asylum.

School is over. For right now, I have a lot of free time but I don't know what to do.

I am not dead. I had been busy with school and now I doing some stuff during my break. First off, even though I am 26 years old, I just got a drivers license a month ago. I still have to get a car but I am looking. One other big task to tackle is getting a job.

As for software projects, I am currently helping with the development of the best Sonic the Hedgehog web site ever: Find the Computer Room. Progress is coming along in testing but I don't know when anything will be placed on the main site. Pizza Py Party is now back in development for the time being thanks to the contributions of reid.kleckner. Pizza Py Party is now on Google Code @ http://code.google.com/p/pizza-py-party/.

As for this blog, I won't post often as I usually don't have anything significant to post. And I'm out.

Just wanted to post and say Happy New Year to everyone. I am sure 2010 will be a better year than 2009 has been. Hopefully it will be for all of you as well.

This semester has been one awful mess so far. My time has been almost entirely consumed with school, work and homework. Because of this, my blog and YouTubed-2x have been neglected. Also, I have had almost no time for fun. I am now giving myself a little free time so that I can relax a bit.

Last night, I finally got to see the movie 9; I originally wanted to see it on the 12th. It doesn't have a deep story behind it but it is awesome action flick and it is a visually impressive film. Besides that, I have been playing a little bit of Left 4 Dead and Beyond Good and Evil. I haven't gotten very far in either game yet.

As for school, my COM 223 (Small Group Process) and ITK 353 (Web Development Technologies) classes have been taking up the majority of my time. The assignments in ITK 353 aren't that difficult but they are really time consuming. ITK 353 is a web development technologies course that is revolving around the usage of JSF (JavaServer Faces). COM 223 requires way too much work outside of class; it is to the point where I have to miss other classes in order to work on group projects. The other ITK course that I am taking this semester is actually a useful course so far; the course is a Concepts of Programming Languages course (basically a compiler course). I feel like I am actually learning something in that class and it is challenging enough to change my way of thinking.

That is enough information about my schooling. There are some tasks that are on my agenda to do sometime soon. I am thinking first about converting my blog application to use class-based views. I also want to make some sort of gallery application. My third round of P90X will be done on Nov. 1st. So far, I have lost 3 inches around my waist and I have only gained around 4-5 lbs this round; my waist is actually at 26.5 in. but, even though it is a lot more tight, I still somehow have too much fat in that area to have anything close to a six-pack. Last but not least, I need to update YouTubed-2x at least one more time.

My little experiment with collaborative development with YouTubed-2x has proven to be a complete failure. I just recently found out about the Help Wanted section of SourceForge so I might try to utilize that and see it anyone wants to join the development team. I want to clean up a couple of the newer features, such as session management, and that will be the main motivation for a new release. I had started working on a possible parser updater for YouTubed-2x and I got a very rough prototype working. However, that feature will not be worked on further mainly due to lack of a user base. If you are not a GP2X or Wiz user, I would suggest that you use xVideoServiceThief instead.

That is about everything that I have been up to lately. I guess you will hear back from me in another two months.

When I started this site, I was using the subdomain that I had gotten through WebFaction. Now that I have had my own domain for a while, I figure that it is time to stop having references to my old subdomain on this site. For now, any requests to ryochan7.webfactional.com will redirect to ryochan7.com. I might get rid of the redirect at some point. That is all.

I registered a domain name for this site a couple of days ago. Now I just have to make better use of my site. http://www.ryochan7.com/

I just made a small change so that RSS feed links are in the sidebar. There is a link for the latest posts feed and there is a link for a feed with posts tagged with a specific tag when browsing archived posts tagged with a specified tag. These feeds were already available but I placed the links in the sidebar to make them even more apparent.

I have just made a tiny change to the CSS stylesheet for this site and the indentETree function in markdown. I might want to post code samples here in the future but there was nothing set up for making the code samples stand out; this was evident in my last blog update post when I posted the line that I use to embed YouTube videos. What I did was minimal but it will be enough for now. Let's see if this works.

def validateURL (full_url, video_item=True):
    """Make sure the url passed is in a valid form and return a video parser object"""
    if not isinstance (full_url, str):
        raise TypeError ("Argument must be a string")

    youtube_video = None

    # Use each parser regular expression to determine what type of URL was given
    for parser in video_parser_list:
        match = parser.const_video_url_re.match (full_url)
        if match:
            page_parser = parser (video_id = match.group (1))
            if video_item:
                youtube_video = VideoItem (page_parser)
            else:
                return page_parser
            break
    # An invalid URL was given. Return None
    if not youtube_video:
        return None

    return youtube_video

As you can see in the previous two blog posts, I have been messing around with various portions of this blog and changing things. There have been a few bug fixes; the biggest bug that was fixed was that raising 404s did not work. Most of the features changes won't be useful to visitors. A preview view has been made that I can use to preview an unpublished blog post that the general public cannot access. Pinging directories, such as Technorati, and pingbacks to other sites now work properly. Some extra settings have been made in my local_settings file. A WMD editor has been added to the admin. Also, I have made a Markdown extension that will allow easy embedding of YouTube videos using an XHTML-compliant object code; the embed codes from YouTube are not XHTML-compliant. I have not checked whether the code will work in Internet Explorer so I can't guarantee that the code will work for you if you are using IE; you should be using a different web browser anyway.

I wrote the extension myself but I took the idea for the syntax of the pattern from Samuel Cormier-Iijima. The example was mention in a comment on another blog. Here is what the Markdown code looks like and then the associated video rendered from the extension.

==youtube(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n3LobCY5HE)==

I will work on adding more over the next few days.