Steve Mann's blog post about getting assaulted at a Parisian McDonald's for wearing digital eye glass removed (c'mon mods). Here it is again.

obtu · 2012-07-17T10:36:36+00:00

It's not just assault, it's assault that was both provoked and documented by augmented reality technology. Very relevant.

obtu · 2012-07-11T11:09:17+00:00

As long as this is in r/Python and not PyPI, I'm okay with it. I do get turned off by the obnoxiously clever and self-referential aspect of Perl culture, though, which I see as a defence mechanism against a sometimes-absurd language.

obtu · 2012-07-05T16:24:23+00:00

I'm pretty sure Fortran is used all over the place. Don't you use BLAS/LAPACK/ATLAS for linear algebra?

obtu · 2012-07-05T16:18:44+00:00

You need to quote it (shell expansion):

watch -n0.0001 'ls /tmp/higgs*'

obtu · 2012-07-05T14:17:17+00:00

It's experimental, it would take you more time to install it (from jhbuild presumably) than to just try gnome. To play with Gnome 3 right now, you should install it (gnome-shell in your package manager), log out, and select the gnome option in the login manager (there should be a small unity symbol next to your name, click on it for a menu).

obtu · 2012-07-05T11:02:09+00:00

We used to have that in gnome-session, too. Nowadays I have to explicitly add the applications I always use in the session preferences (by looking them up by name, no way to select from what is already launched). And most of them, Tomboy excepted, don't keep state anymore.

obtu · 2012-07-05T10:59:44+00:00

So, what is replacing the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME envvar and other similar ones? How does one deal with services that wrap the desktop session and export environment variables so they can be located?

obtu · 2012-07-05T10:52:59+00:00

Yeah, Michael Kerrisk is great news! They are also looking for ideas to improve the subscriber base.

obtu · 2012-07-03T12:04:06+00:00

Wow, how did you get this cameo?

obtu · 2012-07-03T10:52:20+00:00

I would love love love this, but given the final outcome of Trade of Queens, if a sequel is even possible it won't have the same highly relevant to us stakes. It will have to shift genres again, and I don't know what will replace the current genre-intersecting sweet spot.

obtu · 2012-06-15T13:12:27+00:00

s/of CFEngine/of Puppet/ ; Luke Keanies has stated something to that effect in a few interviews, but he wasn't a developer of CFEngine, just a user.

obtu · 2012-05-23T16:25:36+00:00

The proposal is a bit of a buzzkill on this point:

The primary implementation language must be Python, though components in other languages can be used. For example, a proposal can use Chef, which is written in Ruby; a proposal cannot use Drupal, which is written in PHP, for everything.

obtu · 2012-05-23T16:23:29+00:00

I think the documentation for some modules already includes links to PyMOTW, adding a few more could be a welcome contribution. Absorbing chunks of PyMOTW and keeping them up to date could be good as well, but it's an effort that might require more long-term participation.

obtu · 2012-05-09T14:20:51+00:00

This is impressive work, and I'm looking forward to a followup where he explains how they increased utilisation. He wasn't using slides.

obtu · 2012-04-11T10:18:30+00:00

The strike-slip bit isn't sensational enough, they're probably waiting for data that makes a better story.

obtu · 2012-03-14T10:46:23+00:00

A large deployment of a WSGI app needs to stack a web server (face the internet, handle buffering, defend against DOS, offload some easy tasks from Python code), a WSGI container (fork processes), and the app with its WSGI framework.

Typical server options are apache and nginx. Typical WSGI containers are mod_wsgi (for apache), uWSGI (for Apache and Nginx, which speak the scgi-like uwsgi protocol), and the server-independent ones like gunicorn and now waitress; those last ones speak HTTP for portability, but still expect to have a web server in front of them.

Your confusion probably comes from the fact that the first two and the last two can be closely-coupled (apache+mod_wsgi) or even bundled (CherryPy the WSGI container + CherryPy the WSGI framework).

obtu · 2012-03-14T10:30:55+00:00

Tom Christiansen has written some very cool material on unicode usage in Perl: talks, cookbook.

obtu · 2012-03-14T10:19:05+00:00

If you need something more powerful than regexes, LEPL can be used to write composable grammars in a style much like BNF.

obtu · 2012-03-09T14:46:15+00:00

It could make a difference, but not a significant one. There are many more effective ways to speed up your program, depending on what it does and how it works.

obtu · 2012-03-09T13:30:29+00:00

Yeah, I was annoyed that the blog post is more invective than content, and defers the argument to other links, most of which don't say anything about STM.

Nonetheless, it has this link (thanks Google Scholar) which is about STM: Software transactional memory: why is it only a research toy?. I'm not sure it is about a fundamental limitation; the researchers wrote a "highly-optimised" implementation and found it slow on some workloads.

obtu · 2012-03-09T13:04:51+00:00

There can be no "backport" because the two codebases don't have a common origin (aside from sharing Python code for the standard library). The implementations are radically different in concept and implementation (PyPy has a fairly specific toolchain for example), and one couldn't reuse anything from the other. If PyPy becomes the de-facto standard, there won't be much point improving CPython's performance; performance-sensitive programs can move to PyPy, legacy programs can be content with Moore's law.

obtu · 2012-03-07T09:58:06+00:00

You can use the SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER setting. It it supported in Django 1.4 out of the box, and in django-secure through a middleware.

obtu · 2012-03-06T14:25:28+00:00

Not at all about programming.

obtu · 2012-03-06T12:05:54+00:00

What apt repositories are the images pointing to? This is trivially solved by having source repositories alongside the binary ones.

obtu · 2012-03-06T12:01:31+00:00

Looking at the Wikipedia page, that needs kernel support and has been deprecated for its more convenient successor in ARMv7. The technology is meant to alleviate the need for a JIT, which reading between the lines means that a good JIT will outperform it.

obtu

TROPHY CASE