Groovie

Python 2.6 came out yesterday, so I figured I might as well see if Pylons works on it. Pylons already has a set of buildbots that builds Pylons along with some of its dependencies, so it was fairly trivial to add another builder to verify things ran swimmingly on Python 2.6.

Unfortunately, as one can see looking at the build results, things weren’t so great. It appears that nose had a Python 2.6 incompatibility which is used to run all the various Pylons tests, meaning that they all failed so far mainly because the testing tool was Python 2.6 incompatible.

Making Buildbot nicer

While I wait for the new nose to be released, I did at least discover a little bug in my new webapp that provides a nicer view of the buildbot result set. I’ve been fairly displeased with the lack of conciseness of buildbot’s waterfall display for awhile, and noticed that if only buildbot had a few more xmlrpc methods then it’d be trivial to build my own more kind interface.

I should note that the waterfall display isn’t totally horrible, the Django folks spiced their builders up with some CSS work.... which reminds me, it isn’t looking very good for those running on trunk at the moment. ;)

So after making my own little buildbot fork to add some additional custom xmlrpc methods to, I’ve come up with my own buildbot status viewer. I’m sure a more talented designer could spice it up even more, but it gives me the pertinent data I’m interested in without all the boring “builder connected, builder took a vacation” messages that cloud up the waterfall. Also, rather than displaying the cryptic “shell_21 failed” messages, it actually uses the names I attached, and shows them quite clearly for the last build.

I’ll submit some patches for these xmlrpc additions to buildbot when I get the time, but right now I mainly needed the Mercurial 1.0 hook compatibility (that was broken for quite awhile in buildbot), and a fairly specific set of information from the xmlrpc methods that I wasn’t sure others would want.

I’m looking forward to trying out the new nose so that I can hopefully verify Pylons is good to go on Python 2.6 as Phil Jenvey’s been working tirelessly on patches to Beaker and other dependencies to make them 2.6 compatible. Any suggestions or thoughts on improving my buildbot viewer are welcome. :)

Amazingly enough, despite all the hoop-la of how the bailout will pass, on Monday, it failed. It was quite entertaining to me to see a bill that everyone seemed so sure would pass, to just go and fail.

In the meantime I’ve found more than a few interesting links that only go to re-inforce my prior thoughts on the bailout.

The vagueness I noted in some sections of the bailout was quite intentional.

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

Ouch, well that sure is reassuring.

How’d they do? Pretty dang good. They made sure no pesky regulations would affect their golden parachutes, or reduce their paychecks, and they expanded the definition of what assets could be bought to extend beyond just mortgage related securities, to any troubled asset. If some bank has a laundry list of dumb investments that aren’t paying off well, they’re as eligible as anything else if the Treasury considers them at risk of failing (though even what kind of ‘risk of failing’ is required before the Treasury buys such assets seems vague).

Isn’t the point of the free market to let companies that do stupid stuff fail from it?

The NY Times also mentions that many of the financial institutions want to manage the assets that are bought as well, and get paid for it of course, which would generate them a very hefty profit as well.

I haven’t seen a lot in the mainstream media about the huge list of economists (over 165 and counting) who oppose the bailout, which is curious.

So far, this countries track record of hastily passing massive and far reaching pieces of legislation based on hysteria hasn’t worked out too well. It has resulted in a war and all sorts of legislation that is still having ill effects on basic liberties and freedoms. The revised bill which includes more bits to appeal to Republicans doesn’t seem any better, and is still co-written by the financial industry eager to get some more free money.

Ron Paul has some good thoughts on why the bailout is a bad idea, and Michael Moore has an amusing write-up of how to save the banks with plenty of good facts and of a few questionable ones (but overall a good read). I particularly like his #2 point for paying for the bailout.

I disagree with Michael Moore though, mainly because I think Ron Paul and the economists have the right point. Investors should not be subsidized. Investors making risky bets, should take their losses. They clearly want to keep the profit, let them keep the loss as well.

Regardless, I hope the new version doesn’t get passed as well, though given how disappointing the politicians have been for me and the fact that the general public got creeped out watching the investors having a fire-sale means that the financial industry will likely be able to get the new bill passed. Nothing like some hysteria in the stock market to help some legislation creep through.

Ugh.

Update: A rather interesting look at the distribution of wealth in America, figure 5 showing the difference increasing.

Update 2: I should note that the new bailout bill that has had tastier pork tossed in, increased in size by $110 billion, and in size from the 101 page version I read, to a new 451 page bill.

That pretty much negates the odds of most people having enough time to read it, and who knows what other tidbits got buried in it.

With the upcoming expected passage of the bailout, I noticed that the draft text was online so I decided to take a look. There’s some thoughtful provisions that the first bailout plan was lacking, such as an attempt to prevent financial institutions from making an actual profit with plenty of loopholes so they don’t look terribly effective.

Unjust Enrichment

Consider this first attempt to prevent the companies helped, from actually getting a little ‘too much help’:

PREVENTINGUNJUSTENRICHMENT.—In making purchases under the authority of this Act, the Secretary shall take such steps as may be necessary to prevent un-just enrichment of financial institutions participating in a program established under this section, including by preventing the sale of a troubled asset to the Secretary at a higher price than what the seller paid to purchase the asset. This subsection does not apply to troubled assets acquired in a merger or acquisition, or a purchase of assets from a financial institution in conservatorship or receivership, or that has initiated bankruptcy proceedings under title 11, United States Code.

So the Treasury Secretary can’t buy up troubled assets for more than the seller bought them at (who knows how little they’re really worth), unless the assets were acquired in a merger or acquisition. Now, just think about how massive that loophole is… given how many of these financial institutions have been buying each other up. I really hope they don’t pay anywhere near full price for these assets, as they’ve dropped in value significantly since they were issued… and this attempt to stop them from overpaying for them seems rather half-hearted.

Transparency and Review

Unlike the original bill the Treasury wanted, this one sets up a oversight board responsible for reviewing the actions of the Secretary and ensuring there’s compliance with the rest of the act. The oversight board then has to report back to the Congressional Oversight Panel (they sure do love panels and boards). Reports covering purchases and justifications need to be sent to the Congressional Oversight Panel everytime the Treasury uses $50 billion dollars.

Not too shabby on oversight…. I wonder if the report will be put online so the people can see where their money is going?

Attempting to Reign in the foreclosures

A decent chunk of the bill includes provisions attempting to keep people in their homes, rather than foreclosing. This makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, as the more foreclosures that occur, more and more bailouts will be needed.

One of these bits allows for loan modifications of the mortgage:

(2) MODIFICATIONS.—In the case of a residential mortgage loan, modifications made under paragraph (1) may include: A) reduction in interest rates; B) reduction of loan principal; and C) other similar modifications.

Curbing executive compensation

I was actually surprised that lawmakers would do anything to offend the executives at these companies, who shell out so much money to lobbyists that inevitably comes back to the lawmakers, so I’m eying this section with skepticism as I’m sure there’s more than a few loopholes.

The standards required under this subsection shall be effective for the duration of the period that the Secretary holds an equity or debt position in the financial institution.

I’m curious how easy it is for the Treasury to buy troubled assets, and try and get out of a position that qualifies in this case…

Ah, and here’s one rather interesting limitation of the executive compensation, apparently it has nothing to do with how many millions the executive makes, but merely the top 5 executives for a company:

(3) DEFINITION.—For purposes of this section, the term ‘‘senior executive officer’’ means an individual who is one of the top 5 executives of a public company, whose compensated is required to be disclosed pursuant to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and any regulations issued thereunder, and non-public company counterparts.

I really don’t understand why they stopped at the top 5. How about restricting any executive (VP, Senior VP, Partner, etc) from getting those crazy incentives? Why not put a cap on everyone in the company on payment, the fairly reasonable one that they can’t make more than the top paid US Govt official (currently the President, at $400k/yr)?

The good news is that it does reign in some of the crazy executive perks to an extent, like the golden parachutes, and millions of bonuses. CNN reported that in the past few years, executive compensation has gone up 20%, while earnings for the companies went up 3%. Odd how the rest of the employee’s don’t see 20% raises….

The limits are also a little odd, it says that while the Treasury holds assets of the company, they will be in effect:

(A) limits on compensation that exclude incentives for executive officers of a financial institution to take unnecessary and excessive risks that threaten the value of the financial institution during the period that the Secretary holds an equity or debt position in the financial institution;

That’s great and all…. but I’m having trouble finding anywhere defining what these limits actually are.

More Transparency (Section 114)

Ah ha, a mere 39 pages in, a bit more on transparency. The Secretary has to make available to the public, in electronic form, full descriptions, amounts, and pricing of assets that are being bought, within 2 business days of the purchase.

If only the executive branch was a bit more transparent…. :)

How much is it really??

The first chunk of money the Treasury gets to spend, is $250 billion. Later, when its running low supposedly, the President can send a written certification to the Congress that it needs more, and the limit on outstanding money can be raised to $350 billion outstanding. After that, the Pres can write in again, and the amount can be raised to a limit of $700 billion outstanding. So in effect, its a $700 billion bail-out built without any actual data as to whether thats what it will take.

The remaining 30 pages is mainly details on which positions shall oversee who, how often, who’s part of them, etc. Nothing terribly exciting stands out here, nor did I find any explanation of exactly what limits on executive compensation are being applied. Was it just golden parachutes and bonuses?

CNN took a look, and apparently came to a similar conclusion in their reading that the companies aren’t allowed to write new ‘golden parachutes’ for their top 5 executives…. but the current contracts which may include golden parachutes are just dandy.

They also indicate that the companies will not be able to deduct the salary they pay to executives above $500k. Errr, “deduct the salary”? Not sure what that means, hopefully it means that they’re capped at $500k, but its hard to tell.

It still sucks

Overall, I’m still not happy with it. Nor are all these folks, who happen to be economists. There’s some good points in that letter as well:

In addition to the moral hazard inherent in the proposal, the plan makes it difficult to move resources to more highly valued uses. Successful firms that may have been in a position to acquire troubled firms would no longer have a market advantage allowing them to do so; instead, entities that were struggling would now be shored up and competing on equal footing with their more efficient competitors.

This bail out bill is definitely better than the prior one, but I think its still a waste of my taxpayer money. There’s zero guarantee it will work, zero guarantee the money will ever come back, and zero guarantee this will be the last bail-out of this magnitude we come across. While the bill has some measures to try and decrease foreclosures, most in the housing industry still believe the worst is yet to come

“We’ve been saying that the foreclosure trend has not yet peaked,” said Doug Robinson, a spokesman for the foreclosure prevention organization NeighborWorks America. “Before it was a subprime problem,” he said. “Now, it’s everybody’s problem.”

Ouch. So this bail-out only helps a few companies deal with the current problem. I really don’t want to know what will the Treasury ask the taxpayer to do next to stop the companies that hold the upcoming foreclosures from going bankrupt.

I’ve had an iPhone for about a month now, quite loving it. Today I decided to add some custom ringtones to it, so I went into iTunes and clicked the button to sync ringtones…

Really? They couldn’t find any way to add a few ringtones without removing (erasing) all the music I already dragged over? Really???

Pylons 0.9.7rc1 was released a week ago, unfortunately I haven’t had time to actually blog it so better late than never. This is a big step towards the 0.9.7 release, and contains some major changes over 0.9.6 while still retaining a huge degree of backwards compatibility.

At this point, the thing I get asked the most is:

When will Pylons 0.9.7 be released?

So the short answer, when the new website and docs are ready. We’re going to a lot of effort to totally eradicate that old mantra that “Pylons has no docs”, and we’re doing it big. Most of the docs have already been updated, revamped, and moved to the new Sphinx doc tool (Take a look at the new Pylons docs).

The new website is nearing completion as well, and for those using the 0.9.7 release candidate, when posting a traceback you’ll get a link to it thats on the new beta website. Until then, 0.9.7 is feature-frozen and newer RC’s up to 0.9.7 are bug-fix only.

New Features

Pylons gets the substantial amount of its feature-set from the other Python libraries it uses, and here’s some of the new things these libraries have brought Pylons users:

• Moved to WebOb from Paste for the Request and Response objects
• WebHelpers 0.6 (previous was 0.4) This is a huge update, including safely escaped HTML builders, a literal object to mark strings as safe (vs unsafe) for use in templating languages, and a move away from all the old ported Rails helpers to new ones that in many cases have more features with less bugginess
• Routes 1.9, with minimization turned off. This helps for more predictable route generation and matching which confused many, and in some cases led to hard-to-debug routes being created and matched. The new syntax available also breaks with the Rails’ish Routes form, and lets you easily include regexp requirements for parts of the URL.
• Mako Automatic Safe HTML Escaping
• Simplified rendering setup that doesn’t use Buffet
• Simplified middleware setup with easier customizability
• Simplified PylonsApp for customizing dispatch and URL resolving
• and lots of bug fixes!

There’s a more detailed page covering 0.9.7 changes available as well that can also assist in the rather minimal change needed for a 0.9.6 project to get going with 0.9.7rc1.

Other things in Pylons-land

With TurboGears2 extending Pylons for its foundation, many various parts of TG2 have become usable within Pylons, not to mention existing packages that have been getting better and better.

ToscaWidgets has gotten drastically simpler, no longer requiring the rather confusing RuleDispatch package with its generic methods. This makes the tw.forms package install with a fraction of the packages it used to require, and since it comes with Mako templates won’t incur any speed bumps it used to have from its use of Genshi. The new Pylons tutorials for it also make it a breeze to quickly create large forms with advanced widgets.

Some might have noticed that Reddit released their source code, which happens to be in Pylons. Their code is a good example of some of the customizing possible with a Pylons based project, as they added some custom dispatching to make controllers work in a more similar fashion to web.py controllers that they ported their app from. In a way, its similar to how TG2 has been able to support TG1 users for the most part by customizing Pylons to dispatch in a TG1 style manner.

Profiling an application got a lot easier with repoze.profile, and I’m sure more cool bits of WSGI middleware will be coming out of the repoze project in the future, not including some of the past handy bits like repoze.who which is used in TG2 for its new identity system.

I ported a little app that Robert Brewer wrote to track memory leaks. Being terribly uncreative on names for my new WSGI middleware version, I called it Dozer. It’s a handy little piece of WSGI middleware to throw in when you think you might have a memory leak to try and sort it out.

Pylons is moving along quite nicely, and the amount of WSGI middleware and tools that work with it continue to expand which makes it hard to list all the cool new projects I’ve seen lately that work wonderfully with Pylons.

Mako and SQLAlchemy continue to evolve with Mako having pretty much zero backwards incompatible changes in the past 6+ months, while SQLAlchemy slowly deprecates things as they prepare the 0.5 release. These packages have massive amounts of features and are rapidly becoming very stable easily making Pylons + Mako + SQLAlchemy a tough combination to beat.