Peter's Blog 11.3.2004

This is a clever idea:

This is a clever idea: ASK (http://www.paganini.net/ask/). It is a spam filter that works by responding to mail with a confirmation email. If the sender responds to the confirmation then the email is allowed through. The from addresses in spam are unlikely to be valid so the spammer won't respond. It has white and black list too. Nice, and it is written in Python. Unfortunately it only works with unix stuff like sendmail, procmail and other evil daemonic forces. What I want is something that downloads email from my POP provider and provides a POP like interface to IntelliMail, running under windows. I dunno if sendmail can do this.

Written python script to copy command line..

Written python script to copy command line arguments to the clipboard:

#
# Take command line arguments and paste them to the clip board.
#
import sys
import win32clipboard

win32clipboard.OpenClipboard(0)
win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
win32clipboard.SetClipboardText(",".join(sys.argv[1:]))
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()

Then added a shortcut to the script in the 'Send To' menu called 'Copy Path To Clipboard' with the following target:

C:\Python23\pythonw.exe C:\Play\Python\CopyArgToClipboard.pyw

Now I can easily copy the path of any file or directory in explorer to the clipboard. It's useful to me, for example when I want to stick an absolute path to a file into a python script. There used to be a power toy to do this, maybe the windows 95 version works on windows 2000 but anyway, a 10 line Python script does the job.

More modifications to website generation.

More modifications to website generation. The Archive page is now a table with entries arranged by month + year. Only took an hour or so to do this. Python is a very productive language, Cheetah works nicely and HTML-Kit does not get in the way.

HTML-Kit annoyances:

• Tabbing has a mind of it's own.

• HTML-Tidy always moans about tables not having summarys (even tables used for layout) and document appearing to be HTML 4.01 Transitional.

• The beautifier breaks the Cheetah markup

• Some Cheetah markup is long enough to stop preview being laid out properly because the sidebar is too wide. I have to shorten variable names.

• Have to save .css file and switch to html file to preview

There may be workarounds for these, I can live with them. Overall I am happy with the tool set.