Python

Someone asked on the PyGTK mailinglist if it is possible to reuse certain parts of a libglade window several times within an application.
It certainly is, and it's not even hard to do!

I've quickly written a demo application to show how it's done.

The user interface designed in glade is really simple, a textbox with two toggle buttons underneath. Activating one button will display a second, disparate textbox beside the original one. Deactivating it will remove that second textarea.
The other button will display and remove a copy of the first textbox which was there from application startup.
The full widget tree of this interface is shown in the first screenshot.

The actual code to the demo application is rather brief. Continue reading "PyGTK/glade object reuse"

A little utility that has been collecting dust on my harddrive over the past two years is an enhanced version of a PyGTK exception handling module that was originally posted to the PyGTK mailing list by Gustavo Carneiro. I've now uploaded it to the sysfs download area; it is essentially unlicensed, considered public domain by Gustavo according to his email message.

Besides fixing a API incompatibility with recent PyGTK releases, there are two main differences with the original functionality.
First, I've modified the traceback formatting to include two lines of context to each line in the traceback, one before and one after the called line. Also included is a printout of the identifiers referenced in the traceback lines — variables, usually. On my personal wishlist was also syntax coloring in the debug window, but this was both non-trivial to implement, and it would likely add considerably to the complexity of the error handler, thus increasing the chances that the error handler itself would fail.
The other main functionality change is possibility to email feedback to a predefined address — mainly meant for deployment and debugging of company-internal applications. To enable this feature, two identifiers feedback and smtphost must be set on the module. This can be either by modifying the code, or, better, by adding them after module import:

import gtkexcepthook
gtkexcepthook.feedback = 'valid@email.address.here'
gtkexcepthook.smtphost = 'relay.smtp.hostname'

Bugfixes, enhancements and feedback welcome at mechanix on rack66.net.