Chris McCormick

Found: two lettuces, one fennel plant.

Picked: one bucket of olives (now salting), one bucket lemons, several mandarins, four unripened avocados, one handful spring onion sprigs,

Planted: several lettuces, several broccoli plants.

Still haven't got those chickens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

• Omar Khayyám

These days I am using Bitbucket for the git repository hosting and task management on my commercial projects. One thing I often need to do is fetch a list of current tasks so that I can update a client with what is on our current agenda for them, get feedback about priorities etc. Here's a short Python script I hacked together to do that based on some other public domain scripts I found out there:

import base64
import cookielib
import urllib2
import json

class API:
    api_url = 'http://api.bitbucket.org/1.0/'

    def __init__(self, username, password, proxy=None):
        encodedstring = base64.encodestring("%s:%s" % (username, password))[:-1]
        self._auth = "Basic %s" % encodedstring
        self._opener = self._create_opener(proxy)

    def _create_opener(self, proxy=None):
        cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
        cookie_handler = urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj)
        if proxy:
            proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler(proxy)
            opener = urllib2.build_opener(cookie_handler, proxy_handler)
        else:
            opener = urllib2.build_opener(cookie_handler)
        return opener

    def get_issues(self, username, repository, arguments):
        query_url = self.api_url + 'repositories/%s/%s/issues/' % (username, repository)
        if arguments:
            query_url += "?" + "&".join(["=".join(a) for a in arguments])
        try:
            req = urllib2.Request(query_url, None, {"Authorization": self._auth})
            handler = self._opener.open(req)
        except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
            print e.headers
            raise e
        return json.load(handler)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys
    if len(sys.argv) < 5:
        print "Usage: %s username password baseuser repository" % (sys.argv[0],)
    else:
        result = API(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]).get_issues(sys.argv[3], sys.argv[4], (("status", "new"), ("status", "open"), ("limit", "50")))
        for p in result["issues"]:
            print " *%s %s" % (p.has_key("responsible") and "**" or "", p["title"])
            #print p["content"]
            print

Run it to get a usage message.

I secretly wish that bzr had won the distributed version control wars because of its superior user interface, but these days I am resigned to using git because pretty much everybody I have to inter-operate with is using it. It's not that bad.

Deviator, the smartphone based ARG-like artwork by pvi collective that I worked on is showing at PICA in Perth, Western Australia next week after it's successful tour of Glasgow last year.

Apparently tickets are selling fast so get in there quick!