I am proud to finally release gnickr. It has been a pet project for the last few months. After reaching the “cool enough” stage I decided to release it, which demanded much more effort then the software itself; I had to deal with packaging documentation and publicity. As for features it is only about half way implemented. And that half is also pretty dirty, so I will need to clean up a bit for this project to stay manageable.
So what is gnickr? Its not any single application. Gnickr extends Gnome in a way that allows you to use your favorite Gnome photo editing and management software directly in Flickr.

That picture is not new to me. But I just realized that the penguin is crushing the actual building I work in! I feel physically threatened…

I was checking the mail room in my work place daily for the past two months waiting for my Ubuntu CDs. They arrived!
They arrived very late and mushed. But who could complain about something they didn’t pay for?
Installing Ubuntu Breezy is sooo painless it picks up all the weird hardware and just works well.

This is a Python library that works with the Flickr API. There are a few other ones out there, like Beej’s and FlickrClient. I used both to come up with my own. Unlike the other libraries this one uses XML-RPC, that’s not necessarily good but I just thought it fit better in to Python since XML-RPC is part of the standard python library. The format that the API functions return is a nested dictionary, it might change later to something more palatable.
Other features include a streamlined authentication process and an integrated upload method.
The library currently lacks a custom error class and it is not thread safe, and when I say that I mean it will do crazy stuff if you don’t put mutex locks around calls to this library.
Anyway, this whole library came to be because I am working on a Flickr client that I will be releasing shortly. Here is how it works:

>>> agent = flickrlib.FlickrAgent(flickr_api_key,flickr_ssecret)
>>> agent.flickr.people.findByUsername(username='amanda')
{u'id': u'35237103548@N01',
 u'nsid': u'35237103548@N01',
 u'text': u'',
 u'type': u'user',
 u'username': [{u'text': u'Amanda', u'type': u'username'}]}

You could get it here.