I’ve just started cutting new code for SolarLibrary, which is supost to be a partially structed, categorised repository for different types of data, built as a Mambo component. The reason for doing this is for my purposes, I want links, text, files extra to all share the same category space, and be accessable through the same brower view. This is very Drupalesk. But at the moment drupal also doesn’t fit this bill, and I don’t really like the module architecture, which I am quite fond of the Mambo architecture. Besides, I have several other Mambo components which could do with a minor overhaul, and building this component justifies it. ...

After having driven a hybrid car for the first time I was curious if it would be possible to retrofit this kind of technology to an existing vehicle. Basically an electric drive which connects into the crank, or there abouts, which can assist when the engine is under load. Surprisingly there isn’t that many products on the market, with the exception of this: Electrocharger / Retrofit Hybrid :: Sigma Automotive I’m now searching for some products which are actually in production, or some DIY projects. Any help?

On more than one occasion I've needed to iterate over all dates between two dates, and although the code and concept are trivial it does normally take up 20 minutes to find the exact classes to use, simply because it is a long time between uses. So here's the snippet, more for my own reference, but it will probably be useful to others too. from datetime import date, timedelta step = timedelta(1) # one day at a time start = date(2005,1,1) end = date.today() d = start while d <= end: print d d = d + step

More on the python front. This is my first cut at extracting HTML tables from webpages, and returning them in arrays, using Python. (Files here) The usage would look something like this: import urllib from table_parser import * f = urllib.urlopen('http://myweb.com/data.html') p = TableParser() p.feed(f.read()) f.close() print p.doc # Get to the data

RANDOM THOUGHTWe need a unified search API for all websites, so that we can do federated searches across all related websites.IE, I know my info is in one of 3 places, none of which are indexed by google. Solution: Search interface which can hit all the places at once. I’ve done this by hacking the Plone live search facilityProposal. An XML-RPC or GET request which passes a single search string. Results are returned in RSS format.

A Digital library (DL) is an approach to storing, and cataloguing information in the digital age, and many CMS projects have been attempting to achieve, whether they call them digital libraries or not. However a lot of packages make the integration very disjointed. Lets take an example: A website devoted to building boats. There will be articles, photos, links, files, and forums. ...

I can’t help but think that as the cost of transport continues to rise, the importance of the internet in our everyday lives, and interactions within our local communities will increase. We are increasingly shopping online, chatting online and getting up-to-date online. But this is typically with people far away; or at least outside our neighbourhoods. But, as shipping becomes more expensive that ebay item may not be such good value for money, and perhaps it would be better to use the concentrating power of the internet to shop locally. ...