Archives 2010

So, having worked with mDNS/Zeroconf a bit, I thought I'd take a quick look at uPNP, particularly the IGD device type. IGD here is "Internet Gateway Device", i.e. your router. There are approximately two things you want to be able to access from generic software on a router, your external IP address (so you can ...

I've been writing mDNS and uPNP code this past week. It's kinda fun. I've been using a hacked-up version of pyzeroconf which breaks out the multicast, dns and mdns stuff so that multicast-but-not-zeroconf code can use the same code paths as the zeroconf code. Sample code for doing a basic multi-cast but not mDNS operation ...

I have been writing some acceptance tests for a Flex application in Selenium using Nose, and VirtualBox. To do so, I had to fix quite a few bugs in the Selenium Flex API. Are all Flex devs over-engineers? The SFAPI had a scary series of interacting methods, a helper class, multiple pieces of shared state ...

Problem that looks like it will be coming up soon... you are always wanting to be able to test your code against a (huge, PostgreSQL) LIVE DB before you release/promote the code. Loading a DB dump can take hours. Your test code can't all just run in a single transaction.

First approach: run the DB ...

Was looking up something for a backup operation and saw a command where someone was catting from ssh... I'd never thought of doing it before, but it does make sense:

ssh dbhost.example.com "pg_dumpall | gzip -c" > ~/cluster.sql.gz

should connect and dump the entire DB cluster (gzipped) to your local machine.

ssh dbhost.example.com "gunzip -c ...

x.split( '.' )

Is an idiom that shows up all over the place, particularly in list comprehensions. Run your code through 2to3 and it fails when x is a str (bytes) object, as 3.x thinks the '.' is unicode. It fails with a rather cryptic TypeError: Type str doesn't support the buffer API error as ...

At work I need to interact with an svn (1.4) repository, but honestly I'm so spoiled by bzr that it just drives me nuts, particularly the (frustratingly frequent) situations where I miss a particular change-set/revision when merging into my tree and wind up reverting someone's changes.  The VCS should bloody-well track what revisions are missing, ...

The backups did, indeed, work, though the /etc/ backup wasn't quite as recent as I'd have liked.  However, now *another* disk is corrupting (this time the home/var disk), and it looks like it's the motherboard's SATA controller at fault.  Replacing that will require new motherboard, memory, and CPU... and yet another day of working on ...

Decided to see how much work getting PyOpenGL ported to Python 3.x would be.  Notes so far:

• ubuntu has Python 3.1 packaged (yay)
• also has distribute and -dev, you'll need both
• virtualenv -- this is key for my porting work-flow (not just for PyOpenGL, for almost every project), had to use an hg branch to ...

Just log onto the server and see how I arranged the backups... duh!  Server's disk has corrupted irrecoverably.  Hope those backups worked (won't know until I can buy a new disk on Tuesday).