Author archives: Mike

I spent much of Tuesday working on getting PyPy running SimpleParse.  I have to be honest, I was kinda hoping I'd install PyPy and "pow" I'd have a 20x faster parser engine.  It didn't quite work out that way, it was actually 2x slower, with no real explanation of why.  My poor laptop hasn't been ...

At this point I have almost all of SimpleParse converted to pure-python operation. It is still using the Python call-stack for its state storage, just for convenience in coding. That makes it approximately equivalent to the version using "stock" mxTextTools wrt blowing up on recursive grammars (the TextTools fork SimpleParse bundles doesn't blow up on ...

Paul Bukhovko has translated the Python 3D Software page into Bellorussian, so if you're a 3D Pythonista who prefers your summaries in Bellorussian, head on over.

Those who have spoken with me on the topic will recall that I'm rather enthused about PyPy's potential. But every time I've sat down to play with it I've run into a bit of a "small steps" issue... i.e. what small project do I have where I don't need Numpy (which excludes most of my ...

Managed to find and fix a few small bugs in PyOpenGL. Also did some minor Python 3.x compatibility work. BTW, Python 3.x advocates: low-scored reviews on PyPI with snarky comments are not a huge motivator. Actually they are a pretty strong de-motivator. I was so tempted to just change the categorization to something equally snarky ...

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

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