Matt_ptr *

I realize that 99% of what I think would break 99% of all applications, but my dictatorship style is more of a slash and burn kind of style. Out with the old, in with the new.

• Replace the crappy dom, minidom and pulldom libs with lxml.
  XML support in python has always been kind of crummy, but lxml really changes that. It’s fast, robust, and way better than other xml libs that have been around.
• Remove Tkinter.
  It’s just taking up space.
• Remove the stuff for reading and writing audio files.
  I don’t really understand why Python and other stdlibs (I’m looking at you Windows) include stuff for outputting and/or manipulating WAV files. Yet there’s no other format support. This is something that’s best handled by a 3rd party, IMO.
• Replace telnetlib with an ssh library.
  I hope no one uses telnet anymore. I can’t remember the last time I had to telnet in to something
• Add an encryption library to the “Cryptographic Services”
  It’s just hashlib and hmac right now.
• I would also love for FTP to die, so replacing ftplib with an sftp lib might help facilitate that.

:)

Someone pointed out to me today that if you look at the source of the front page on www.geico.com, you might see that they use a certain timer script for rotating banners…

In fact, it’s this one: http://www.geico.com/public/scripts/jquery/jquery.timer.js

Yeah! That’s me! And all this time I thought the script was pretty useless, but I guess a certain Gecko found a good place for it.

Honestly, I may have used that script once or twice, but that’s it. I don’t use timers a lot. But, if there’s enough interest, I’m open to adding bug fixes and features and such. I’ll also accept patches, etc.

Thanks to Alex for pointing that out. Pretty neet! ;)

I’ve talked before about how I thought PHP’s date handling is the best thing about PHP.

Well, I kinda lied. It sucks…

It works fine if you’re dealing with dates in the here and now, but say you’re accepting user input for a date-of-birth field. strtotime() returns a signed integer, and if you look carefully, you’ll see that strtotime() will fail on early PHP5 revisions on Windows for dates before 1/1/1970.

So that’s problem 1. Problem 2 is going past 1/19/2038.  You would think that it wouldn’t be a problem on 64-bit systems, but I have no idea if that’s the case or not — I can’t seem to find any documentation on 64-bit versions of PHP using 64-bit timestamps.

Luckily, there’s a new DateTime class for PHP 5.2 and up. The constructor of the DateTime class accepts anything that strtotime() can, and DateTime::format() accepts a date() style format. So that’s easy enough. Hopefully, you deduce by my lack of griping, that Pre-epoch and post-2038 dates will work. I didn’t test to see how far back or forward, it can go. Far enough for my uses.

Why the new class isn’t listed on the date() and strtotime() pages — I have no idea. Hopefully now I won’t have another Epoch Fail.