..since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been in the process of rewriting my site. I’m tired of Wordpress, tired of escaping code, tired of futzing with code to make it readable, and basically tired of Wordpress working against me rather than with me. So I took a look at other blogging systems… and none of them had all the characteristics that I wanted. So I’ve been busy in background developing my own using Django. This will allow me to write code in blogs much easier, and I didn’t have to jump through the pain of trying to design my own Wordpress template.
The other big change I’m going to make is moving this site to a hosting provider. This site is run out of a box in the corner on a machine that’s a number of years old… it’s definitely on it’s last legs. I’ve purchased a slice from Slicehost, and hope to be moving this site there in the not too distant future. I’m going to do my best to try and not break the RSS feeds… but I can’t make any guarantees.
I wanted a copy of my svnsync’d version of the SVN repo while at PyCon. It’s about 450MB (and it’s not up-to-date currently)… but it has quite a few files. In 20 minutes time, it only got about 60MB of data across the wire. I killed it and ran:
ssh host “tar jcvf -C /path/to/parent - dir” | tar jxvf -
and it was done in roughly 25 minutes. Nice.
This has been sitting in the queue for a while, but didn’t publish it for some reason…
I got this link from Daring Fireball and saw something interesting in the comments section (Comment 19):
Now, I’ve worked on embedded devices–and if I ever had to say “Oh, you need to reboot your device periodically,” well, I would have been left in the cold. The simple fact of the matter is this: it doesn’t matter whether you’re running Mac OS X, or Safari, or anything else. The expectation needs to be that I can use this device all the time without having to reboot. That’s part of what makes embedded programming hard.
It turns out that by default, on Leopard, Python 2.5 looks at ~/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages for Python modules. The problem is that nothing installs there by default. However, distutils (and setuptools) will read settings from ~/.pydistutils.cfg allowing you to configure some default settings for the install and easy_install commands. After a little bit of work, here’s the final result:
[easy_install]
# set the default location to install packages
install_dir = $HOME/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
[install]
install-base=$HOME
install-purelib=$HOME/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
install-platlib=$HOME/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
install-scripts=$HOME/bin
install-data=$HOME/Library/Python/2.5/share
install-headers=$HOME/Library/Python/2.5/Headers
Now I can worry less about what’s going to happen with my Python modules the next time I upgrade.
It was an exciting first day at PyCon. I met Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick (who is just as down to earth as he appears to be), Ted Leung, Steve Holden (Director of the PSF), and many, many other great contributors to the community.
I was completely beat at the end of the day, especially after spending several hours editing slides for a talk I’m supposed to give back home. I slept longer than I have in a very long time–which is refreshing.
So, I’m getting geared up for today. I’m particularly excited about Alex Martelli’s talk on callback patterns and idioms in Python and Jono DiCarlo’s talk on Python Application Development. And I’m really looking forward to meeting a few more people. So if you happen to read this, and you’re at pycon, look for me! Here’s a picture of me (with my two kids):
So, I bought IWork ‘08 the other day and started playing around with it. I was glad to see they fixed a couple of things with IWork ‘06–there was some bug with gradient fills and tables that ended up leaving a thin line of background near the top edge of the cell… but only when you printed or made the PDF.
One thing I was kind of excited about was seeing Apple’s spin on Excel: Numbers. So, being an engineer, I opened up to a blank worksheet, filled column A with 0-360, and column B with SIN(RADIANS(A[X]))–where X is the corresponding row in A, and then created a chart from column B. So this chart has 361 points in it–relatively small considering some that I’ve done in Excel where in upwards of 40,000 points. Well, with 4 processors and 5GB of RAM, Numbers couldn’t be responsive while doing anything with that chart. In fact, I tried tweaking the chart in a couple of ways and ended up crashing the application. Backing the number of points down to ~180 made things work much better. It was a little disappointing. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to want to use 360 or more points in a graph. Anything that involves daily costs, or maybe daily inventories, or… well, you get the idea. I hope the next version takes care of some of these issues. From an engineering perspective, I really need to see more.
Yesterday I was setting up a new VM under VMWare Workstation when I noticed that mouse grabbing was not working. Now I use my VMs extensively, so I expect this feature to work as it slows productivity when it doesn’t. After digging around, I found that the VMWare Tools installer hadn’t modified the xorg.conf to handle the mouse. It turns out that they released the Xorg drivers as open source and now they’re maintained by the Xorg team! So, in this case, I fired up Synaptic and installed the vmmouse input driver, modified the driver line in my xorg.conf to be ‘vmmouse’ instead of ‘mouse’, and restarted X. Tada! I now have mouse grabbing without having to start the vmware-toolbox.
So, I was at work yesterday, trying to troubleshoot a problem we were having with our customer’s build system. For some reason, we’re seeing make fail with a complaint about a missing endif—an error that they’ve never seen. So we proceed with the usual check of tools and found that we were using the same versions of everything. Same gcc, same make, same binutils, same everything… except the Linux distribution.
To make a long story short, we discovered that their build system does not support make 3.80, because 3.80 has a nasty bug that doesn’t allow you to use eval within a conditional. Fedora Core 4 patched make, and low and behold, it works on our customer’s system. However, my distribution—SuSE—did not patch make, and therefore, did not work. So much for supporting make 3.80.
I’m very excited to be attending this year. I wanted to attend the last couple of years, but had some family matters to attend to. I’m hoping to learn a few things and run into a few people while I’m there. If you haven’t signed up already, click the badge and do so!
I downloaded the software upgrade for my ipod touch so that I could get the Mail application. Unfortunately, our mail servers use a self-signed certificate so whenever the Mail tried to verify the IMAP connection it would pop up a box asking to continue. I hit ‘continue’ and it’d sit there until several minutes later when it would time out. I logged into our mail server and watched the logs and it appears the Mail application was effectively terminating the connection after I hit continue. I decided to hit ‘cancel’ instead and then hit save again. It threw up a disclaimer saying I may not be able to receive mail, but low and behold: when I went to look at my inbox, mail was there! Yay! I’m really liking my ipod touch… too bad I can’t carry it around with me at work. :-(