Archives 2010

Mocker has one uber-nice feature... it will mock out an object in basically all namespaces, so you can do a .proxy( 'mymodule.this.that' ) and have the resulting mock object replace the target "that" wherever it's been imported.  It won't, for instance, pick up references in lists, sets and the like, but for basic namespaces (dictionaries) ...

Say you want to have a test suite that tests logic which runs command-line processes that should *not* be run on the test machine (e.g. they would cause the test machine's configuration to be totally messed up).  You want to test right down to the point where the call is made (i.e. you don't way ...

It's like the standard DHCP client and server are *trying* to be ridiculous.  Half the custom options show up, the others don't, no error messages, different SELinux restraints on different systems, standard options seemingly unknown on one side or another, options just disappearing without explanation.

If you don't understand an option, log an error, don't ...

The DHCP hiccup I've been debugging all week turns out to have bee nothing other than an SELinux restriction preventing the config-file from being read.  Most annoying part is that I already discovered that restriction weeks ago and thought I'd resolved it.  Now to dive in and figure out how to make this work properly, ...

Why the heck is wikipedia *deleting* articles for not being universally notable rather than simply assigning a "notability" level to them?  It's a computer system, and you store all of the revisions anyway, so why delete something rather than simply marking it less-widely relevant (and thereby decreasing search-result ranks and the like)?  I gather somebody ...

Nepomuk/Strigi felt like indexing my desktop to be all semantic-y.  Great... but wow, ~20% CPU for ~12hrs and constant disk thrashing... temperature spiked up pretty bad before I noticed it (not damaging bad, but if there'd been another load on there (i.e. graphics) I'm guessing it would have fried the machine), memory completely exhausted too ...

Seeing ridiculously slow PostgreSQL performance on an application.  Can't claim the application is particularly tightly coded for DB usage (too much ORM-ish-ness), so there's room to improve there, but right now we're seeing the same app 10x slower on the EC2 instances than on my (somewhat high-end) laptop... which makes me wonder if there's some ...

Why do half my tests suddenly fail, thinks me?  Me thinks, me looks, me finds no PIL!  Egadzooks, thinks me, thinking thinkily, what has become of my Python 2.5 PIL?  Aptitude thinks, and returns no thoughts of a Python 2.5 python-imaging?  Me thinks methinks me thoughts must turn to source.

[Update] For those who encounter ...

I upgraded my laptop to Kubuntu Lucid to help test the release.  I've now got debug and crash messages popping up in Eric, Plasma crashing when I remove widgets, mkfontscale crashing if I have my .fonts directory available, multi-second pauses on alt-tab (that one's a killer when you work, as I do, by constantly switching ...

My little experiment in Upstart is going to get rolled back, it appears.  While the system worked perfectly on modern Linux (Karmic Ubuntu), it wouldn't even recognize the scripts as valid on the Fedora 10 servers.  Given that the release of Upstart is so old, I'm thinking I'll wind up managing the 6-7 state transitions/events ...