from __future__ import *

We've (finally) updated talkingpanda.com today with a fresh new look and a new product: iBar.

iBar turns your iPod (any iPod with a screen and a dock connector) into an "ultimate bartending tool" with over a thousand drink recipes, mixing techniques, and even a couple history lessons. Like any good bar should be, it's stocked. Altogether, the Notes content adds up to over 3 megabytes (yes, that's text!) with more than 40 minutes of original, professionally recorded, audio.

Like its sibling iLingo, iBar ships with installers for Mac OS X and Windows XP/2000 (everywhere iTunes is supported) that make installation painless.

And for relevance, here's a little bit about how it's all put together:

• The Mac OS X installer was developed with Python 2.3, PyObjC 1.2, and bundled up with py2app.
• The Win32 installer was developed with Python 2.4, win32all, Tkinter, PIL and is bundled up with py2exe and then made self-contained with NSIS.
• The build scripts for the installer application actually use even more open source stuff. We use JExcelAPI to convert Excel spreadsheets to XML, and Win32::Exe to swap out the ICO resource out of win32 executables -- but no Java or Perl makes it into the redistributable :)

We're also blogging updates and podcasting some of our content, so point your NetNewsWire or Safari RSS over to Talking Panda News!

I've been working on some automation scripts to take data out of excel and do useful things with it, and I hit a big stumbling block with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel. Unicode SUCKS in Perl, and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel does nothing at all to help you with that. Each cell gets its own encoding ('ucs2', '_native_' which I haven't seen, or it's simply undef.. which seems to be latin-1). Anyway, it's completely bogus, so I started shopping around for another implementation.

Andy Khan's JExcelApi does the trick and is light-years more correct and faster than the alternatives I have tried (other than the time it takes a JVM to start). Not only that, but by default the jar does exactly what I want it to do. It gets the unicode right, and everything worked perfectly the first time. My dealings with Excel files have been reduced to the following:

java -jar -Djxl.encoding=latin1 jxl.jar -xml EXCELFILE.xls

And the Python code to parse the workbook xml document from jxl looks roughly like this:

from xml.dom import minidom

def parseDocRows(doc):
    for row in doc.getElementsByTagName(u'row'):
        rowdata = [
            u''.join([x.nodeValue for x in col.childNodes])
            for col in row.getElementsByTagName(u'col')]
        if rowdata:
            yield rowdata

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    for row in parseDocRows(minidom.parse(file(sys.argv[1]))):
        print row

Thanks!