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PySide Up and Running in OS X Lion
At the moment, I store all my passwords in text files which I manage with Vim. This is, of course, a horrible idea. It’s true that I name the files cryptically, so anyone who stole my laptop would probably take a long time figuring out what they were, but there’s still really no excuse. It’s better than using a pet’s name for everything, mind you – my passwords are all suitably secure – but still. Now, I’m well aware that there are tons of password manager apps out there, but this is the sort of thing that I would really
Using Eclim with the Samsung Smart TV SDK
I’m about ready to port the existing Samsung Smart TV app that I’ve developed for our distinguished partner to our own use. One problem: the Samsung Smart TV SDK has advanced by leaps and bounds in the meantime. For example, you can’t use the Samsung Smart TV IDE with SDK version 4.1 – you must use Eclipse instead. In theory, I shouldn’t really care, since I developed the old one by sniffing out where the source files were and editing them with Vim, the way any self-respecting hacker would. Why bother yourself with corporate bloatwear when the World’s Best Editor
Making an API where there isn’t one with Requests
The Python Requests module has made my life easier on countless occasions. This is the story of one of those times. One of the projects I work on at work involves interacting with a mildly shady VDN. Without getting into my litany of complaints, what’s relevant here is that they make it somewhat difficult to delete old accounts en masse. It’s not a user interface problem: they give you a convenient listing of the video subaccounts you have with little xs you can click to delete them; what sucks about it is that you have to wait for each of
Getting Regular Feedback from a Remote Server with Growl and Python
Recently, the iCalendar feed of one of the applications I work on caused it to crash – at the worst possible time (of course!). We have to pull iCalendar data from Google every so often so that customers can block out periods of time on their appointment schedules by using their Google Calendar feed. The script responsible for grabbing this information and saving it to the local database, it turns out, was spawning too many database processes and never releasing them, which eventually ate up all the database resources causing the application to have no access to its data. I
Vim and Readline
Today is a very happy day for me, and that’s because I just found out on StackOverflow that there IS a way to use vi key bindings on the MySql command interface! YAY! Seriously, this has been a major thorn in my side. At work, I maintain an aging piece of software (no worries, currently in the process of majorly upgrading it!) with a lot of complexity to it, and so I freqently find myself talking to MySql directly to undo things I’ve done, implement customer requests, etc. The day will come when all of this will go through the
Styling Menus in Drupal
I’m warming to the Drupal content management framework (as we’re apparently meant to call it). For getting a site up and running in record time, you really can’t beat it. Well, OK, maybe you can beat it with Rails, but I wouldn’t necessarily wager a lot on that. (I haven’t done, and don’t know anyone who’s done, a side-by-side comparison using people of roughly equal proficiency in both frameworks, and I really don’t have a guess as to how it would come out.) But it has a massively steep learning curve, and even once you’re getting the hang of things,
Mark All Unread Messages as Read in Mutt
I get a lot of mail from mailing list, the overwhelming majority of which I never read. So, in some cases I’ve configured the mailing list to send me everything in a giant once-a-week dump. If these messages are coming from Europe, as is often the case, it can sometimes happen in the world’s best email client that they arrive out of order. You see, mutt sorts (by default) by the date sent, but that doesn’t always correspond, under mass mailings, to the date received. What this means is that I sometimes open my inbox to find that some of
Rails and its Attitude Problem
I ran across this awesome post on Hacker News today (the post itself is nearly a year old), and it reminded me that I’ve been building up steam that I need to let out over the past couple of weeks. We all know the story. Rails has been publicly sucking at life for a couple of weeks now. The problems are with the design (more accurately, with a lack of appreciation for the dangers inherent in such a design, which is in itself not especially harmful), but they’ve recently come to the fore in a really serious and visible way.
An Unhelpful Apache Error
Zend 2 has been out for some time now, and since Zend’s a framework that I use for freelance PHP projects, I should really get around to updating my knowledge. With that in mind, I ended up in my local machine’s Apache config file to set up some virtual hosts for apps that I’m thinking of porting to Zend 2. And I found out that I’d been doing this in a dispreferred way. Apparently, you’re supposed to put your vhost config files in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. OK, OK, you got me – no one actually cares where the file is or what
Multiple SSH Keys for Passwordless Login
So, we got a new server in the Computational Linguistics program, and thanks to my helping them figure some things out, I get sudo privileges. Yay! Therefore, I’m in the process of moving all my IU-related activities to that computer. Part of that involved setting up SSH keys for login to various websites I maintain on campus. You see, IU has this thing where you can only access certain of their computers from another computer on the iu.edu network. So, to maintain websites, I have to first log in to the Computational Lingusitics server, which I can fortunately do remotely,
