Chris McCormick

Deviator, the show I worked on with PVI Collective and friends, is playing in Sydney, Australia starting tomorrow night. Get in there, tickets sell fast!

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.

Prediction: within 3 years the stylus will be the killer feature of Android tablets.

I'm talking about true stylus input via induction, not those capacitive styluses you can buy for the current crop of tablets.

HTC Flyer, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, Asus Eee Pad MeMo, and Samsung Galaxy Note are at the forefront of this wave of hybrid capacitive + inductive (e.g. finger + stylus input in separate channels) Android tablets.

Pretty soon we'll all be wondering how we managed on tablets that only had capacitive/finger input.

Note: the most cutting edge versions of Android support full stylus support. Maybe this will be one of the rare times Android beats iOS to a killer feature.

I've long anticipated a logographic / hand drawn social network or micro-blogging platform where status updates come in the form of sketches. Maybe the upcoming stylus ubiquity will bring it about?