Latest News >> 2008-09-29

I read Obie’s most recent post about his intense passion for Loverboy’s quintessential anthem, “Lovin’ Every Minute Of It”. I find the early 1980’s music is inspiring and uplifting and definitely suited to such important things as corporate culture, recruiting, and motivating the troops to do better. Yes, nothing gets a worker working better than a little Loverboy right in their ear.

2008-09-25

Don’t forget folks, the FU NYC show will be in a few hours (7pm-9pm). I’ll be icecasting this one at http://zedshaw.com:8000/fu_nyc and as usual you can use VLC, mplayer or many other players to play the stream.

2008-09-17

I got into music school last week and I’m going to study guitar exclusively for the next year. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, but just never had the chance. Either I wasn’t good enough (being self-taught for so many years) or I just didn’t have the money. After being laid off and getting a small package I decided to practice my ass off on the guitar, do a few live shows to get ready, and then audition for a school in the city.

2008-09-04

The Freehackers Union NYC show went insanely well. I managed to pull off a full live internet feed of the audio to people in FU and the show at the same time. We had about 10 newbies show up to give their first five minutes and 11 listeners on IRC/icecast. Some people showed up just to hang out, so we relaxed the rules and let them stay to build an audience. Overall, there were some cool projects presented and everyone had a good time.

Forking With Permission

I started playing with python recently and decided to contact the author of a nice little parser generator I used once back in 2003 called Yapps2 that really saved my ass once.

Yapps2 is nice because it’s small and hackable. My motivation for forking it is to turn Yapps2 into a decent parser generator for processing protocols consistently, either binary, textual, or combined. Included in the source distribution is an example of this with the examples/stackish.g file that implements the Utu Stackish format.

After contacting the original author Amit Patel he recommended that I fork the project, and even gave me a decent name: Zapps. Zed’s Additional Python Parsing System. I like it so I’m going with it.

Version 0.2

Download 0.2…

Going with the latest Idiopidae release I’m also putting out a new Zapps that Idiopidae needs. This release adds a fairly important grammar production that wasn’t in the original Yapps: optionals.

This means you can take any part of a grammar and put a ’?’ (question mark) and it will be optionally followed in the parser if the first element is in the token stream. This is fairly primitive but implements the extent of an RDP parser’s capability in this area (more of an LL(1) than RDP).

I used this in Idiopidae to implement optional formatting and langauge specifications for the export and include statements:

rule Include: 
    INCLUDE WS File WS Section Format? {{ self.doc.include(File, Section, Format) }}
rule Export: EXPORT WS Section Language?  {{ self.doc.export(Section, Language) }}

It should also work for productions that are just parenthetical, but I’ve only used it with named productions.

Install with the usual mechanism of sudo python setup.py install and you can also get at the latest source with Bazaar by doing:

bzr pull http://www.zedshaw.com/repository/zapps

If you have patches feel free to email them to me until I move to a Launchpad account or something similar.

Version 0.1

This release is nothing more than a simple code reorganization to fit into the python distutils way of doing things. The original yapps2 was done as just some source files, so I wanted to modernize it for easier contribution and use by Python folks.

You can grab that release here

Note that the Python Pack production is there, but not implemented yet, that’ll be done most likely during PyCon so watch out.