Quick and Dirty Network File sharing with Python

Ever find yourself in need to share file over the network quickly, but find yourself lacking time to setup a proper NFS or samba share? Here’s a way to do this with the good old Python CLI.

  • First, go to the directory that you want to share, for example ~/Desktop
  • Then run this command "python -m SimpleHTTPServer"
  • You may access the folder from a remote computer using any webrowser using the url – http://192.168.1.20:8000, change the ip address accordingly
Simple HTTP Server
file sharing with python

You may find this technique offers limited options to share files, but its a real time saver!

Ubuntu Hardy Python XML error bugfix – xml.dom.ext

This was brought to my attention when I’m working on a python code to parse xml documents. I found out that in Ubuntu Hardy, the python-xml package has moved xml.dom.ext.* package to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oldxml thus breaking python code which depended on python-xml.

One way to work around this bug is to append :

sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python%s/site-packages/oldxml' % sys.version[:3])

just before you import stuff from xml.dom.ext.*. Hope that would help you.

gnome-osd: Handy On-Screen Display for XChat and Evolution

I just want to share with you about gnome-osd, a GNOME desktop add-on that I find handy when working on my computer’s desktop.

This add-on provide informational on-screen display when triggered by certain events such as new email, somebody mentions your nick over the irc and when the music player changes the song.

Personally, I use gnome-osd with Xchat IRC client, when I’m in a mood for online chatting with friends.

To use gnome-osd, you need to install ‘gnome-osd’ package and configure it by accessing System->OSD Notifications. You can enable certain triggers by checking the appropriate box on the dialog box as shown here :

osd2.png

Here’s an example of gnome-osd in action:

gnome-osd-papit3.jpg

From the screenshot, you can see that I’ve tweak the settings a little bit to display the messages on the lower right corner of my screen. The OSD is triggered whenever anybody mentions my nick on the IRC.