Monthly Archives: April 2011

Fun with zc.buildout

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I’ve been exploring zc.buildout (another link) lately. In the past, I’ve typically gone the simpler route of using virtualenv and pip, but I knew that buildout could do some powerful things and I’ve long wanted to kick the tires.

I’m using buildout for a Django project at work and it’s working out pretty well, though I sense that I might just be scratching the surface. Tonight, I wanted to play with some of the other buildout recipes.

The result is this educational buildout gist that demonstrates a recipe for building and deploying Varnish and a recipe for installing Supervisor.

The supervisor manages two processes — a simple one-line Python “origin server” on port 8080 and a Varnish reverse proxy on port 8000.

Skype AppleScripts

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These are some AppleScripts that I developed to make it easier to dial into a daily conference call. For this conference call, I dial into an 888 number and then I dial an 8 digit conference code and hit the ‘#’ key to enter a particular conference. Surprisingly, Skype doesn’t let you do this in a simple way by adding something like “,,12345678#” to the phone number, so I had to resort to scripting.

SkypeDialer.applescript provides core services that can be used by other AppleScripts, including SkypeDialerGUI. You should open SkypeDialer.applescript with AppleScript Editor and then save it as a stay-open application (File | Save As… and then for the File Format, select “Application” and in Options, make sure that “Stay Open” is checked). I saved mine in /Applications so I have /Applications/Skype Dialer.app.

SkypeDialerGUI can be used as a regular script or an application.

GitHub repository: skype-applescripts