I submitted my Lab 4 late because I spent all of last week at ApacheCon US 2007 in Atlanta, GA. ApacheCon was awesome, BTW.

Lab 4 was very straight forward. I did this lab with Python and the Akismet module for Python works very well. I used uuidgen to generate my UUID. uuidgen is a command line tool for generating UUIDs that comes with most Linux distros. Invoking it and getting the output back took some effort. I’m using the following code:

import subprocess

uuid = subprocess.Popen(["/usr/bin/uuidgen"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0].strip()

Most of Python is nice and concise and it’s unfortunate that you have to do something so ugly to do something that’s so trivial in other scripting languages.

After playing around with Python boto, I was able to get the SQS code working.  I wasn’t able to test my implementation against other students’ lab 3 implementations but my code appears to be working just fine with my lab 3.