Recently, a reader wrote in about a problem they were having with Multiprocessing in Windows and Python. Since I’ve actually had this come up several times before, I decided I would go ahead and write a quick explanation about it for others that might have the same problem.
Related Posts
If you know me in real life, you know that I hate stupid people. You also know that I hate pushy sales people. For example, a few years ago, I was walking into a restaurant for dinner when a salesman from a car dealership across the road came running up behind me in the parking lot. He introduced himself as, we’ll call him Bob, and immediately began asking me questions about my truck. In case you didn’t already know, I drive a Chevy Avalanche. Anyways, at the time, I had only had my truck for a couple of weeks. The sales guy started asking me if I like my truck and if I got it for a good price. At first, I thought this was just some guy that was also eating at the same restaurant and was genuinely interested in my truck. But, I was starving and quickly informed the guy that he was stopping me from eating. If he wanted to know more about my truck, I told him there was a Chevrolet dealership directly across the road and he could go there for more answers. That’s when the guy explained to me that he was a salesman from the dealership across the road. WTF?!?
Related Posts
Some of the first articles I wrote for this blog showed you how to build a website using WordPress. As I’ve found out over the last year, many people have followed those articles and are now running successful blogs of their own. In fact, I just received an email from a reader that used the information I provided in those articles to create her own blog. She also followed another article of mine that listed some of the WordPress plugins I’m using on this site. One of the plugins she chose to use is a plugin called “Contact Form 7” which provides you with a simple feedback form for your contact page.
Providing your visitors with an easy to use feedback form is a double-edged sword. Not only does it provide an easy way for your site visitors to contact you, it also makes it easy for bots (automated programs) to fill your inbox full of spam as the reader above recently found out. Over the weekend, she received over 500 emails from her site, all of which turned out to be junk mail and she wanted a way to keep this from happening again. So, she sent me an email explaining the situation and asked if I had any tricks that could help her. Lucky for her, I’ve already ran into this problem before and had a solution; a solution I’m going to share with you now.
Related Posts
In the last couple of years, it seems like webservices have become more and more the standard for sharing data with multiple applications. System designers and architects are pushing back against the idea of connecting directly to a database to access data. Instead, they prefer applications to access data through a middle-ware solution such as webservices.
Most current programming languages have the ability call webservices as long as they can parse XML. Typically when one needs to call a webservice, they would use an already written and proven library to do the work for them. After all, why reinvent the wheel? But, what about technologies that don’t have an existing library for calling webservices? Or, what about those who want to create their own webservice libraries?
Well, I want to take a minute to show you a really simple way to call webservices with Python using a standard HTTP post. I recently needed something quick for testing a webservice I wrote in another language and want to share that with you now. However, I won’t be showing you how to to parse the response XML in this article. I’ll save that for another post. But, with this simple approach to calling webservices, you’ll be able to send a SOAP message to a webservice and get back the response XML as a string. At that point, you can search Google for hundreds or even thousands of other sites that will show you how to parse the returned string as XML, or you can wait until I have time to write the second piece to this article. 
Let’s get started.
Related Posts
Back in February, I bought my fiancee a new treadmill. The thing was extremely nice and worked great for about a week. Then, we started having problems with the treadmill tripping the circuit breaker. Every time we would reset the breaker, it would trip again as soon as we turned on the treadmill. Being that we live in a house that is barely 2 years old, I thought the wiring in the house was sufficient. However, we put the treadmill in one of our guest bedrooms which only had a 15 amp circuit for the entire room. I know 15 amps aren’t much, but other than the lights, the treadmill is the only other thing on that breaker when in use.
At first, my biggest worry was that the treadmill was defective. Instead of jumping to conclusions and going through all the trouble of sending the treadmill back, I did a little bit of research and found plenty of others having the same issue with similar and even identical treadmills. As a “fix”, many of the people I read reviews from said that simply swapping out their 15 amp breaker for a 20 amp resolved the issue. Personally, I wasn’t too pleased with this option as I’ve known others to do this in the past. For fear of causing a fire, I chose to look for another “solution”.
