Author archives: Mike

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).

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 ...