The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2008
Saturday morning I attended the Friends and Members preview of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and was faced with my annual choice between spending £12 on two glasses of Pimms or going whole hog, spending £18 on a jug and getting sloshed.
The Summer Exhibition is something I always approach with some trepidation as it can get quite overwhelming. With two or three galleries crammed full of paintings and people it is very easy to tire yourself out trying to see everything or just get frustrated and steam on through to larger stuff at the end. Although, I’m pleased to say that this wasn’t the case this year.
The standard at the ‘low end’ was phenomenal, not that I’ve ever seen any bad work before but there has been a lot of unremarkable paintings in the past. What was missing this year was the celebrated ‘high end’ work, there was no naked Tony Blair getting expelled from paradise or anything that you could really latch on to as being the centre or highlight of the exhibition.
I think what will stick out for people is Tracy Emin’s gallery. The very fact that it’s darkened sets it apart from the rest of the bright Summer Exhibition, then there’s the rather understated notice (pictured above) out side… and then there’s its content. This is not a collection of Emin’s work but rather her personal choice of things she wanted included (mainly from her friends and colleagues.) The content is definitely shocking and a few a pieces are definitely not for the faint hearted!
Friday Night at Cafe Oto
This Friday I went to see my good friend Isnaj Dui perform at a relatively new arts venue, in a rather overcast Stoke Newington, called Cafe Oto.
Despite a slightly awkward journey I was very impressed with the venue. Its white brick walls and concrete floor gave it a blank canvas feel that made it seem anything was possible in its confines (although I’d imagine this might be an acoustical nightmare for anything in the direction of a drum kit.) On the menu was the usual selection of bottled organic beers and wines, although I seemed to drink the ginger beer for most of the night - it was really amazing ginger beer, after all.
Isnaj Dui gave a beautiful recital of haunting flutes and electrodulcimer which caused quite a stir amongst the audience. On second was Suzy Mangion whose melancholy vocals and sombre rendition of Down Town sent many a shiver down my spine.
All in all a very interesting if not off beat evening.
Setting and Getting Cookies in Google’s WebApp
Here’s the disclaimer: I’m currently teaching myself Python for use with Google’s App Engine and (unlike my PHP or Perl) I’m not entirely sure if the below is best practice or even remotely sane, but that said, it does seem to work for me!
Setting a Cookie
Notes: Obviously the code is running in a controller (or rather a Request Handler) that extends webapp.RequestHandler and you’ll notice that I had to use a Regular Expression to remove the header name from Cookie.SimpleCookie’s output so I could tie it in to webapp’s header frame work which should stop any output buffering issues in the future.
import Cookie
import re
import base64
class YourHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
cookieName = 'MyCookie'
domain = ''
expires = 360
value = 'Some value or something...'
def get(self):
simpleCookieObj = Cookie.SimpleCookie()
simpleCookieObj[self.cookieName] = str(base64.b64encode(self.value))
simpleCookieObj[self.cookieName]['expires'] = self.expires
simpleCookieObj[self.cookieName]['path'] = '/'
simpleCookieObj[self.cookieName]['domain'] = self.domain
simpleCookieObj[self.cookieName]['secure'] = ''
#Cookie.SimpleCookie's output doesn't seem to be compatible with WebApps's http header functions
#and this is a dirty fix
headerStr = simpleCookieObj.output()
regExObj = re.compile('^Set-Cookie: ')
self.response.headers.add_header('Set-Cookie', str(regExObj.sub('', headerStr, count=1)))
Getting a Cookie
Notes: This is much easier, we just have to make sure that it exists.
import Cookie
import base64
class YourOtherHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
cookieName = 'MyCookie'
def get(self):
try:
cookieValue = str(base64.b64decode(self.request.cookies[self.cookieName]))
except KeyError:
#There wasn't a Cookie called that
cookieValue = ''
Changing Default hostname in Google App Engine Launcher
These past few weeks I’ve mostly been writing Python for Google’s App Engine and listening to Country Music. They say a change is as good as a holiday, so two changes must be equivalent to a cruise or something.
To cut to the chase, today I was testing some Cookie functionality and needed to run my WebApp on another domain other than localhost and of course, since I was using the App Engine Launcher GUI rather than the command line, I couldn’t find any documentation on how to do it.
To be fair, I didn’t look very hard, I just tried the following:
I added –address= followed by the hostname I wanted to run my WebApp under and low and behold I could access it across my LAN!
Talk is Cheap.
The above image will be deleted once it’s been downloaded from my server 100 times.
Brilliant…
Rob found this on the internet today… I thought it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen!
After some consideration I decided to post it on my blog in order to stick it to the conformists out there.
Poor kid - I’m glad we didn’t have photo sharing sites when I was 14!
