I'm writing a web app which receives data from Excel 2010 on Windows 7 (64 bit). I'm using a small VBA macro for data upload and web page opening. However, when using ActiveWorkbook.FollowHyperlink in VBA the website is not opened by my default browser initially (Chrome in my example), but by some MS Office internal Internet Explorer instance. I'm redirecting from this first URL … and my real web browser is called on the redirected URL only. Got it? The header of the first access contains the following user agent:

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; ms-office)

The server response with a redirect and the other url is called by the same user agent. At the end this second url is opened with my default browser, which happens to be:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.63 Safari/534.3

Unfortunately this is not useful, as I'm setting a cookie at the first request (where the redirect occurs). I only found an ugly solution using ShellExecute (so far):

Private Declare Function ShellExecute Lib "shell32.dll" Alias "ShellExecuteA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal lpOperation As String, ByVal lpFile As String, ByVal lpParameters As String, ByVal lpDirectory As String, ByVal nShowCmd As Long) As Long

and then opening the website by:

ShellExecute 0, vbNullString, "http://...", vbNullString, vbNullString, vbNormalFocus

Others seem to have the same problem ( http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel.programming/browse_thread/thread/3191ab7cbebe38e8). But ShellExecute really should only be a last resort. Never mind, it's just Microsoft.

I started a small project back in May where I was trying to use Python 3 for web development for the first time. While it somehow worked (with ugly hacks in the stdlib and being a memory hog), I finally decided it to be a failure. As I needed the project to get in production I switched back to Python 2 and everything worked out well. Still, I'm interested in web development on Python 3. Recently the author of the Python 3 enabled WSGI framework  bottle started a new project  multipart to fix the problems with cgi.FieldStorage. As the WSGI problems on Python 3 are under  constant discussion I want to demonstrate the use of multipart in bottle even though multipart has not yet been integrated in bottle by the author. In my mind it can be used already (at least for development and test instances), it works well, and doesn't look ugly at all. So you are welcome to have a look at  the source of my sample application and test the demo instance.

Recently I started to implement a small web app in py3k and wsgi. While none of the major python web frameworks are ready for py3k anytime soon and wsgi for py3k is still under major discussions (see for example  this current post by Armin Ronacher), there are already options to actually start working on the subject.

I'm using  bottle (dev tree) and the current releases of  sqlalchemy,  py-postgresql and  jinja2 on Python 3.1.2. This actually works sort of. I will likely write some further posts about my progress. However, I quickly found a bug in the cgi multipart input handling, which actually turned out to arise from two different sources. I tried to solve it and just opened  issue 8846 on the  Python issue tracker showing my findings.