Command not found

When asked by a friend to present Python for the web for an university course, I though: “Why don’t present Python inside some Python-powered slides?” and for training purposes I’ve created http://restlides.com/ a django-powered site that allows us to create and share ReSructured Text based presentations, obviously it’s in an very early alpha version, created during a weekend, but it works and I’m afraid I’ll continue developing it, I have in mind many new features. That’s all, try it and of course, any feedback is welcome!

For deployment I’m using apache2 with mod_python and varnish an “state-of-the-art”[1] reverse proxy, very easy to install and configure, you only have to put apache to the back and connect varnish to it, then adjust varnish’s port to 80 in /etc/defaults.

[1] Althought it last release was in December’07, and no activity on its trac, quite dead, I wrote to Poul-Henning Kamp, its developer to get feedback about the situation.

… I asked: “Are there any people working?” … And he replied:

Yes, very much so, but we've not spent enough time on the wiki.
We hope to release version 2.0 in august.

Look!, with this framework, you could easily crawl the web and take automatically that bit that you ever wanted! …  Better than this, you can take those similar bits from that bunch of cool websites you have bookmarked a long time ago and said “some day they will be useful”.  The day have arrived, you can take your hands on Python code and start programming your application to take all the stuff you want from the web. You will love standards more and more. Ahh!, and don’t forget to join us and help, the spirit of open source software is present once again, have fun scraper! http://scrapy.org/

I didn’t want to search for it, so I made mine:

• python:

def join(l):
    """ Joins pieces with a connector recursively """
    if type(l) is list:
        if len(l) < 3:
            exit("ERROR: there aren't any pieces to join")
        c0 = join(l[0])
        c2 = join(l[2:]) if len(l) > 3 else join(l[2])
        if all([c0,c2]):
            return “%s%s%s” % (c0, l[1], c2)
        else:
            return c0 or c2
    else:
        return l

• php:

/**
 * Function to construct a "clean" text by passing
 * an array of words and its connectors.
 */
function join_clean($words){
    if(is_array($words)){
        if(count($words) < 3)
            die("ERROR: there aren't any pieces to join");
        $c0 = join_clean($words[0]);
        if(count($words) > 3)
            $c2 = join_clean(array_slice($words, 2));
        else
            $c2 = join_clean($words[2]);
        if($c0 && $c2)
            return $c0.$words[1].$c2;
        elseif($c0)
            return $c0;
        else
            return $c2;
    }else
        return $words;
}