I recently had a reason to try out Hipchat, being a bit of a “chat enthusiast” (I was an IRC network admin for about 7 years and have a been developer on a few web chat and IM systems) I found Hipchat to be one of the nicest (that I’ve used) of the recent stream of “IRC for the web” products out there (for example 37 Signal’s Campfire).

Normally this would have been the end of my quick perusal, until the next time I had reason to the use the service, but I noticed they had not only an API, but also Jabber/XMPP exposure for creating bots. Now my interest was piqued.
Looking at the existing third-party bots out there I found you had your choice of languages…as long as that choice was Ruby or Javascript. ;-)

Now I’m not averse to developing in either, but they’re not my preferred languages by far (okay Javascript has a soft spot in my heart but I still haven’t made the jump to server-side JS dev).

So with that I present hippybot
(Hipchat Python Bot, geddit?)
Not to be confused with Hippy, a PHP library for the Hipchat API.

I wrote hippybot using the excellent python-jabberbot, a library that utilises the equally brilliant xmpppy to allow the creation of bots in an easy to understand and pythonic way (e.g. inherit from base class, set some connection strings, override event methods if need be, use decorators to extend commands the bot responds to).

How is this different from a regular Jabber bot? I’ve written some Hipchat-specific customisations into the bot:

• The connection config assumes Hipchat’s XMPP server, and various details such as the username and channel names have Hipchat specific [pre/suf]fixes added to them automatically.


• The bot “understands” at-sign mentions (e.g. those popularised by Twitter and supported by Hipchat for directing messages to specific people within rooms, as well as triggering notifications), and commands added by plugins can leverage this.

I’ve added a simple plugin API to the bot, which consists of either creating a function in a module with a decorator, or a class in a module with as many decorated methods (each a different command to trigger the bot) as you like, and the ability to create aliases for commands and define whether a command is triggered by an at-sign mention or not (e.g. @hippybot do something!).

In the next release I plan to add a simple wrapper to Hipchat’s API (already in master), better at-sign mention handling, and some more core plugins.

Feel free to check it out and for an example of the sorts of things you can do with a bot like this just check out some of the things Github’s hubot does.

I very rarely ask people to spread links about or push my wares, but in this instance I would greatly appreciate sharing this link to anyone you might know who creates/publishes comics of any form (web comics, digital comic books etc.) online.

Morgan Robert Mason, born April 26th 12.07am, 10 lbs exactly, mother and baby well (but exhausted).

Well, actually v1.1.0 of django-form-scaffold was released last week, but I’ve been a bit too busy to blog about it since then.

A quick recap for the uninitiated: dfs is a set of utilities for generating the mark up and Django template code to display all the fields in a Django Form, e.g. the task of displaying each input element, label text and error message is still given to Django, but we display the markup around those elements in the template itself.

The library offers a few variants on the Form.as_* methods, which will output mark up similar to those methods.

New in v1.1.0:

• A README typo fix, spotted by Chris Matthews.
• A management command (formscaffold), based on a script submitted by Chris Matthews.
• Some fixes to the way form errors are generated for ModelForms.

To use the new management command just add ‘dfs’ to your settings.INSTALLED_APPS tuple and the command will become available.
It’s used like so:

./manage formscaffold my_app.forms MyCustomForm as_p
# or if using buildout
bin/django formscaffold my_app.forms MyCustomForm as_p

The above would generate the form using <p/> tags, for the class MyCustomForm located in the module/package my_app.forms.

Please note, if your form requires any setup (e.g. values passing to the constructor or the instance) the above won’t work, as it just creates a base instance from the class and passes that to the helper, you can still use dfs to do this from a Django app shell though (using ./manage.py shell).

I’ve been doing it again, despite having revamped this site with a view to keeping it more up to date, I’ve entered into a blogmire.
Other than the fact I’m a lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy man, one of the reasons I don’t blog much here but do put lots of things on Twitter (and code on Github), is barrier to entry; both of these have an extremely low barrier to getting my data out there (Twitter clients, vim & git on the command line, etc.)

I’m wondering if switching to a static file generator system like Blogofile might help me be more productive with the place, reducing my workflow on 1stvamp.org down to a vim → git problem.

Seems I forgot to update my Habari instance and the site got buggered by some spam bot over the holidays, apologies while I root around for the last backup.

Just a note to say while I’ve been a little lapse on here, I have been posting on various topics (mostly Python related) to the Isotoma blog:

• Getting the name of the current view in a Django template
• Querying Webtrends analytics via ODBC with SQLAlchemy
• Writing interactive command line DB query tools with pyDBCLI
• Querying Webtrends ODBC from the command line with WebtrendsQT

I built a new app, called Thweddy. From the FAQ:

It makes threads of tweets, so you can send a full conversation to someone else (or include it in another tweet) to people rather than copying and pasting half a dozen different URLs for each one.

For those that don’t know, this Saturday I’ll be finally getting married to my long time (and long suffering) fiancée Andrea.
As joyous an occasion as this Saturday will be, there is one problem. I have to give a speech.
I’m not unaccustomed to public speaking, having given a few techy talks here and there, and during uni, but this…well..this is different.
Giving my speech as the groom of the day will involve standing up in front of a room filled with friends, family, and family-to-be.
As my manager said the other day, this is actually the one time in which your audience is more on your side than any other audience you’ll ever speak before, and yet it’s still as frightening as all hell.

As for how my speech is going, I’ve written over half of it, but I’m now considering re-writing what I’ve got as I’m just not sure if it’s the way I want to go.
Jonty has suggested I write a bunch, plus a markov chaining tool, and generate a speech. Of course he also suggested I include lyrics from The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

Whatever I come up with in the end, I’m sure it’ll be fine, as long as I thank the right people and hit the right sentiments.

“Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I’d like to take a minute
Just sit right there…”

I’m giving a talk at Brumcon9 this Saturday, titled “Friend me! – Data-mining the social web”, this is my outline (work in progress):

• Who I am
• The “social web”, what’s thattabout den?
• Data mining, identity theft, social engineering, and digital forensics
• The case of the missing tweet
• Tools of the trade
• APIs, apps, loopholes & exploits
• Stalking Miss Daisy
• Outro