Starling looks very interesting – it’s a “light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol”. To use it you fire up your regular memcached client library, point it at the Starling server, and do a regular set to put an item on the queue, and a get to read an item from the queue.

  # Start the Starling server as a daemonized process:
  starling -h 192.168.1.1 -d

  # Put messages onto a queue:
  require 'memcache'
  starling = MemCache.new('192.168.1.1:22122')
  starling.set('my_queue', 12345)

  # Get messages from the queue:
  require 'memcache'
  starling = MemCache.new('192.168.1.1:22122')
  loop { puts starling.get('my_queue') }

This thing is nice in many ways: it’s very simple with practically no configuration, ala memcached; it’s stable and scalable, running Twitter’s production backend clusters; and it speaks a simple and universally available protocol (memcache), meaning you can use any of the existing client libraries to access it.

This answers half of my request for a Python or Ruby messaging server (it does the work-queue half, doesn’t do the pub/sub half). I think I’m going to give it a try. Let me know if you’ve tried it.

It also has me thinking – with all of the multitude of async-IO capabilities out there for Python, why isn’t there something like this implemented in Python? Between Twisted, asynchat, Eventlet, and the 19 other libraries and toolkits out there, surely somebody smart could whip something together in short order?

Mille Fleurs is one of San Diego’s better known high end restaurants. We ate there with some friends last night and once again I was disappointed. The lobster bisque was luke-warm and a tad salty. The steak was good, but only cooked on one end (I’m not even sure how that’s possible). My friend asked for one of the dishes to be prepared without meat and ended up with an extremely bland pasta, devoid of any flavor. The lamb was ok, but my wife found the lamb we had at Robbie and Julie’s much better. The dessert was slightly better fare, but overall quite disappointing. My previous dining experience there was similar – underwhelmed. I think I’m done with Mille Fleurs.

This was a bit painful and not well documented, so documenting here for future reference.

Say you want to parse and normalize dates with timezones (eg. dates in email headers, I believe based on rfc822). Here’s what you do:

Install pytz.

import email, time, datetime
import pytz
utctimestamp = email.Utils.mktime_tz(email.Utils.parsedate_tz( msg['Date'] ))
utcdate= datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp( utctimestamp, pytz.utc )
pacificdate = utcdate.astimezone(pytz.timezone('US/Pacific'))

parsedate_tz produces a tuple that can be digested by mktime_tz, which in turn spits out a timestamp based on the UTC timezone. You can turn this into a datetime via fromtimestamp and set its timezone to UTC. Once you have the TZ aware datetime you can manipulate it to your heart’s content; the final line above converts it to a US/Pacific date.

Full example:

>>> import email, time, datetime
>>> import pytz
>>> date_eastern = 'Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:56:13 -0500'
>>> utctimestamp = email.Utils.mktime_tz(email.Utils.parsedate_tz( date_eastern ))
>>> utcdate= datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp( utctimestamp, pytz.utc )
>>> utcdate
datetime.datetime(2008, 1, 31, 22, 56, 13, tzinfo=<UTC>)
utcdate.astimezone(pytz.timezone('US/Pacific'))
datetime.datetime(2008, 1, 31, 14, 56, 13, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Pacific' PST-1 day, 16:00:00 STD>)

Obama continues to impress me. Listen to this speech on religion – he actually speaks in intelligent terms, assumes an intelligent audience, and refuses to take a divisive, one-sided stance.

Bella is an interesting movie. It flashes back and forth in time – my uncle commented the direction reminded him of 21 grams. It strikes a nice balance of being obvious and mysterious at the same time. Worth watching.