Author archives: Mike

D'Arcy asked if I could port basicproperty, basictypes, wxoo, etceteras to Python3.  Not really high on the priority list, but why not dash it off; add 2to3, see happy Python3-ers.  Will log any issues as they arise here...

Python3.2 testing virtualenv can't install anything (not even pip).  Seems that the distribute and distutils code are ...

Mike Bayer mentioned in comments yesterday that one can configure SQLAlchemy to use one session with multiple database connections, so I decided to play with it tonight.  This is in the context of a TurboGears 2.1 app with SQLAlchemy 0.5.8, btw.

Documentation for how to setup the mapping isn't particularly helpful about best practice for ...

Set out to make an app use two different databases today; one for a high-write-volume set, the other for low-volume mostly-read set.  It's a TurboGears 2.0 application using SQLAlchemy.  I'd half-way hoped for "tell these tables they're in that db" and then have the ORM figure out all the magic of which session to use ...

Some things it occurs to me that I'd like to see in a new Python profiler:

• High resolution, accurate, captured data (obviously)
• Trace every line executed (yes, every line)
• Trace every call operation, i.e. CALL #32 of function #45 took 0.0003s and have a record of CALL #32 which details what *it* called, its timing, ...

Searching for links to some of my presentations from PyCon (particularly the audio/video).  Lots of links to no-longer-existing pages at PyCon.org.  There's an unofficial mirror that at least covers back to 2009, but most of the older stuff seems to have black-holed.

Globalsub is a mechanism to allow you easily replace an object throughout your interpreter.  This is normally done to make it easier to test.  You can stub out objects which have side effects for most of your tests and just test those functions in carefully isolated environments.  It comes from the Mocker codebase originally, but ...

After the hiccups of a few days ago where suspend/resume didn't work for a day or so, my laptop seems to have settled into a happy place.  Suspend/resume is now working, and I haven't had any hard-hangs where the machine becomes unresponsive (which was why I upgraded to the backported KDE 4.7.1).  Which is to ...

You don't need to be an expert on something.  It doesn't need to be something obscure.

Talk about how to use a debugger effectively.  Talk about how using a debugger is a crutch for those too weak to use TDD.  Talk about how TDD is a crutch for those too insecure about their code to ...

Since updating to Ubuntu 11.04, my Thinkpad has, at long last, been able to resume.  Unfortunately, it has also suffered lots of X crashes/hangs from KDE software.  That's kinda frustrating, so I decided to try updating to KDE 4.7 on 11.04, to see if that was more stable.  Unfortunately, the machine is back to never ...

Ran into a little problem today that requires being able to see what timezones (of the Linux-ish America/Toronto, America/Montreal variety) are equivalent to one another.:

#! /usr/bin/env python
"""Stupid little script to find equivalent timezones"""
import pytz, pprint, pickle, datetime
all_timezones = [pytz.timezone(name) for name in pytz.all_timezones]
def search():
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    set = {} ...