Archives August 2009

Continuing to toy with rdiff-backup.  There's enough areas that you *don't* want to back up (or rather, don't need to, such as icon and font caches) that you wind up with some pretty hideous command-line operations if you go that route, but this post is about another need, namely the need to "compress" the storage size by hard-linking duplicate files in the backups.

This really shows up on my system because of the use of virtualenv.  I have hundreds of MBs of installations which are all pretty-much identical (save for a different "final project", each TurboGears2 project ...

Can't sleep, so thought I might do some work getting a better backup system built for our machines.  I really like rdiff-backup so far, it's got the "rewind to any time" functionality I'd like, along with reasonable query features and fairly simple operation, so this:

rdiff-backup --exclude-if-present .svn --exclude-if-present .bzr --exclude-if-present CVS

pretty much does what I'd want, save that I'd actually want there to be "placeholders" for each of those excluded files (i.e. the svn info, CVS info, bzr info), maybe with some logic such that e.g. changed/un-checked-in files would be ...

As regular readers will know, I've been working (slowly) on a rewrite of my BIS Thesis in Design Epistemology.  The original thesis was huge, covering way more material than anyone should attempt to cover in one thesis, and as a result it was rather cursory in its coverage of most of the areas on which it touched.  It was also written as a "design thesis", that is, as a designed work (mostly short stories) rather than a prosaic paper.

The revised thesis is far more prosaic and far more straightforward.  It's also turning out to be far longer ...

Have been seeing weirdly trivial blog-post spam lately.  Someone will post a single-line comment that is entirely generic, no real content, just a bland "nice post" or "thanks for the article" where the user's URL is a link to what looks like a SEO page.

Turns out that there's a set of sites that "markets" collections of "Do Follow" (i.e. those not rewriting links with the no-follow attribute) enabled blogs, where the purchasers are asked to stump up cash and post "useful" messages to the blogs involved so that they don't exhaust the resource (i.e ...

Checked in the initial OpenGL 3.2 support, haven't done *any* checking on it yet.  So buyer beware on bzr trunk :) .  Really do need to get the pyglet-generator branch working some day.

Oh, also ran 2to3 across the package.  It finished (used to blow up on the larger files), so it may be possible some day to run on Python 3.x, though honestly my interest in the test rapidly approached 0 as I finished the run and considered the idea of integrating the changes.  Can I really afford to spread my already rather thin resources over supporting a ...

We're going with a round-table discussion at PyGTA this evening.  How do *you* deal with exceptional conditions in your code?  7:10pm at Linux Caffe.

It seems like all of the projects I host on SourceForge are no longer easy-installable.  The only ones that can install are the ones that have been uploaded to PyPI, and then only the versions on PyPI install (i.e. a later version on SF doesn't install or prevent an earlier version from installing).  I'm guessing this is a further iteration in the "war" of hacks that involves downloading HTML and parsing it in order to find links; SF's recent restructuring of their files-for-download stuff probably just broke the parser-based stuff (likely SF is using AJAX to ...

Our open discussion on Tuesday will be on the topic of exceptional conditions (and how to handle them).  More details on the PyGTA site.

Playing a bit with Python context managers for PyOpenGL.  Considering adding them pervasively, likely with a configuration flag. (idea is from Florian's gletools)...

• OpenGL.arrays.VBO -- make a context manager itself (this is already implemented)
• OpenGL.GL.compileShader -- make the shader int returned a context manager (implemented)

Those two I consider non-controversial, as they are already non-standard entry points, and the "thing" really is a context manager, you want to do things "with" it.  More pause-inducing:

• glEnable*/glDisable* -- return context manager reversing the boolean logic, including e.g. glEnableClient* glEnableVertexAttrib*, etc.
• glPush* -- return context manager doing a pop of ...

Continuing to plow through writing tutorials.  There's now 10 GLSL code walk through style tutorials for OpenGLContext.  Next up should likely be texturing/samplers.  I'm going to have to start factoring out some of the common code, as large blocks are basically the same for each tutorial and they're making it somewhat cumbersome.  I'm also thinking maybe I should use legacy opengl standard for the spot-light exponentiation.