If you ever need to connect to a Magento E-Commerce system to export or import data, you may come across documentation about its SOAP interface. A lot of the provided documentation assumes that you are using PHP, however, the SOAP interface is not limited to just PHP, but other languages can also interface with it. My current favorite language happens to be Python, so I started to look, but haven’t found much.

Here’s a quick snippet of code to help you get started. I am using Python 2.7 and a SOAP module called suds. A few assumptions: the server name will be ‘server‘, the user will be ‘swrat‘ and the password will be ‘password‘. Be sure to replace those with the appropriate values in your environment.


import suds
from suds.client import Client
wsdl_file = 'http://server/api/v2_soap?wsdl=1'
user = 'swrat'
password = 'password'
client = Client(wsdl_file) # load the wsdl file
session = client.service.login(user, password) # login and create a session
# Let's dump the category tree hiearchy, using node id = 2 as the root (which should be the Default Category)
root = 2
tree = client.service.catalogCategoryTree(session, root)
# print it out, this should show the full data structure returned in soap
print tree


This is a quick post, so I will stop here. This shows you how to use python to talk to Magento and obtain some product category data. Compare this with the API documentation and you should be able to see how this works and extend the code to call other APIs.

Anyway, go download it now, follow the instructions here:

http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Installing/Windows

When you start it up normally it will prompt you to enter a host, then when connected, the host will prompt you for a user and a password. That’s a lot of typing and us programmers are lazy so I started looking for ways to cut that down.

So let’s set out to do this, with a goal to have an shortcut or quick launch button that will automatically get you into your host and allow you to work right away without any typing at all. Obviously, this only makes sense to have on your personal desktop. You would not want to have this on a public or shared machine.

So here’s goes:

1. Public and Private key generation

We know that SSH supports key-based authentication. You will need to generate a set of keys, private and public. Place the public key on the host where you are connecting to. If you already have preexisting keys, you can skip this step.

So start up PuTTY gen (which is installed along with PuTTY if you had grabbed the whole package).

Adjust the key settings if you like. I like to use 2048-bit keys to be more secure. But let’s stick with defaults for now, it’s inconsequential to this post. Now click on Generate.

It will ask for you to randomly move the mouse to get some randomness for the key generation, which is very important.

Type in a pass phrase + confirmation for the private key. Then click both ‘Save public key’ and ‘Save private key’. Place the keys in a safe directory. Let’s name them key.pub and key.ppk.

Note the top box “Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file”. Do a select-all in that box, and copy it.

2. Now, let’s add that public key into your authorized_keys file on your host.

Open up a PuTTY session to your host and type in your user name and password (soon we won’t have to do this step!). Now, go to your ~/.ssh directory and edit the authorized_keys file with your favorite editor. Create the file if it doesn’t exist.

vi ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Paste the public key that you had just copied into your clipboard into this file. Add it to the end of the file, on its own line.  Be sure to append this new key into the file. Do not remove the other existing keys (if any) unless that’s your real intention.

Alternatively, you can copy the key.pub file we had saved above into the host and then append it to the authorized_keys file. However, the key.pub file contains line breaks within the MIME64 encoded string, which needs to be removed. With the line breaks, the SSH server will not recognize the key as a valid key.

You should test that the keys are working by starting up a Pageant (spelling error?), and adding your private key. You will see the pagent as a tray icon after starting it.

Then fire up a new PuTTY session to your host. It should log you in after just typing in your username.

3. Setting up PuTTY sessions

Now we need to create a PuTTY session that contains all your preferences that can be reloaded in the future. Bring up the PuTTY configuration screen, which should pop up by default when you start PuTTY.

Adjust all your preferences (you can come back to fine tune more later). Then type in a session name under “Saved Sessions”, and click Save. I named my session ‘server’ here to access my host named… “server”.

4. Set up the shortcuts

We are almost done. Now we need to set up the shortcuts to do the right thing, so we’ll get our one-click convenience.

First, make a copy of the PuTTY shortcut from the start menu and paste it on to your desktop. Then right click on the shortcut and select Properties to start editing the properties.

From the PuTTY documentation you will find that PuTTY accepts a few commandline arguments. What we care about are the -load switch and the -l switch.

The -load switch allows you to specify which session to use. So in our case, we would specify -load “server”.

The -l switch allows you to specify the user name on the host. Put the appropriate username here for yourself. I will use -l swrat.

Putting it together, we have:

“C:\Program Files\PuTTY\putty.exe” -load “server” -l swrat

So place this in your shortcut properties.

Now the shortcut should work correctly when you click on it, taking you directly to your server without having to type in the servername, your login name, or your password. Place this short cut on your desktop, in your start menu, or on your quick launch bar. Wherever you want.

But we are not quite done yet. There is one more step. Remember we had to start pageant and manually add your private key? Lets make that step semi-automatic too. You will only need to type in the password for your private key once.

Repeat steps 2-4 for each host that you would like to set up one-click login for. If you would like to use more than one public-private key pair, repeat step 1.

5. Setting up pageant

Make a copy of the pageant shortcut from the start menu and copy it to your desktop. And start editing its properties, like the previous step for the PuTTY short cut.

Pageant can be started with the private key(s) that you want to use loaded w/o having to manually add the keys. The syntax is simple:

“C:\Program Files\PuTTY\pageant.exe” <path to key 1> [<path to key 2> ...]

So simply edit the target in the shortcut properties and add the full path to where you saved your private key file, I had named it key.ppk. For example:

“C:\Program Files\PuTTY\pageant.exe” “C:\Documents and Settings\Swrat\My Documents\sshkey\key.ppk”

This will obviously vary for each individual.

Now place this shortcut in your Start Menu -> Startup menu. Now during Windows startup, Pageant will prompt you for your private key password.

For more information, refer to the PuTTY documentation. Everything is (buried) in there! Pageant information is in section 9. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what can be done with this wonderful software.

The first thing I did was to google this topic and I can across this short article. In it, it discusses how to make a system safe, which is a bit different from making a system reliable. But it is going in the right direction (for me). It suggested using a backup system that is completely independent of the primary system, which is also a difficult task. The current problem at my work is that when the primary system fails, it also takes damages the backup. Which is really bad. I must approach this problem differently. Stay tuned.

While setting it up, I ran into this error message:

“uninitialized constant Authlogic”

I also had my config/environment.rb set up correctly with:

config.gem “authlogic”

The gem is in the directory where it should be, so I was pretty confused for a while. But it turned out to be very simple to solve. All these time my Webrick server was running, and it turns out that all I needed was to restart the server. For some reason the server won’t pick up new gems that you installed. Anyway, I thought I’d make a quick post here in case this will help anyone struggling w/ this problem.

But accessing my blog on the go is cool, especially when I put a lot of my notes and reminders here for quick access. Actually, i am learning to type faster and faster using two fingers now than just a few minutes ago. One has to realize that the point of contact with the screen is not the tip of your finger or thumb, but somewhere a few mm in.

If (and a big IF) congress does pass a rule to tax the executive bonuses and are able to enforce it, HOW are we, the people, going to see any proof that these executives are taxed? Will they release the tax return forms of these executives? What about future bonus payments from AIG to these executives to “make up” for 2008′s lost bonuses?

AIG insured the congress’s pension funds and was a major contributor of campaign funds for many congressmen. You betcha they — the top brass of AIG, are in bed with the congress, that’s why they even DARED to make the bonus payouts. I serious doubt any real action will take place. I scream CORRUPTION!! Start writing to your senators and representatives to demand for tangible proof! (I hope not all of them are corrupt.)

For me, it also depends on the shape of the bulb If its round and bulging, I can already imagine dollars flying away. Luckily, I already replaced the most often used bulbs in my house with compact flash bulbs. Also the easy to reach ones. The other less used incandescent bulbs, unless its broken, I probably won’t switch them out. My main motive is to lower costs, so it won’t make sense to spend money on bulbs that I rarely turn on.

To get a sense of how much it costs to run a 100W bulb 24/7 for a month, I just calculate how many kWH that is: 100W * 24Hr/Day * 30 days / 1000 W/KW = 72KWH. If a kWH costs 14 cents, that’s $10.08 a month.

So 100W running all the time is roughly $10 a month. (Your real cost may be a little different, but this should be in the ballpark.)

You might have to come up with your own rule of thumb if you are dealing in another currency or if your costs are not the same (e.g. if it depends on peak/non-peak hours).

Of course this can be applied to any appliance. 100 watts is 100 watts, it doesn’t matter what device it is. To know how much electricity your devices use, you can turn off everything in your house, and run that device alone for a month, and see what the electricity bill is. Or… you can purchase a kill-a-watt device to measure it.

Here’s a run-down of some of the devices that I’ve measured:

My 1st-gen Core Duo MacBook busy crunching a distributed.net key: 44 W
My server with Phenom 9350e Quad Core 2.0GHz processor also busy crunching: 70W
My workstation with Phenom 9850 2.5Ghz 100% utilization: 180W (I’m not happy about this one.)

(More devices to come.)

As you can see applying this rule of thumb can quickly allow me to gauge how much my bill will be if I add an additional server, or if I decided to upgrade to a crossfire setup for some real gaming. Or if you decided to contribute to folding@home.

A little off topic: a lot of distributed computing projects were started on the basis of harvesting idle cycles of processors. This is from a time when processors do not have power savings mode and runs at full throttle whether it is doing work or not. If you have a modern CPU (anything made within the last 5 years), your CPU most likely will throttle down to use less power when its idle. The newer the processor, the more sophisticated is its power saving mode(s). If your computer has to be on all the time, the extra load may not be significant relative to the overall power it is drawing from the wall. You will have to measure it to really know. With that said, I think some of the projects out there is still worthy of your contribution. And there are ones that I believe are a waste, but I will refrain from naming them since that is just my own personal opinion.