Mostly Unixish Standalone, single-file, editable Python scripts WITH DEPENDENCIES How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's great for shell
Ollivander Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand
Mostly Unixish Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations
Mostly Unixish SCP taming: stop local silliness Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful
Ollivander Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan There's one pattern that, nowadays, I find amusing; the productivity mantra is repeated everywhere. Everybody wants to get more productive, every company is trying to make their employees more productive. Robotics, AI: everything
Ollivander Command line data crunching with Python Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one
Mostly Unixish Git: automatically set and use multiple commit identities Sure, git is great. Sure it is possible to use multiple commit identities in git - just set local per-repo variables. If it weren't for the fact that chances of forgetting about it
Ollivander Shell scripting: short or long format options? This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep
Ollivander Stopping The Internet Of Noise - A Useful Internet Back Again The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage.
Ollivander Students that don't "get" computer science - bimodality as a teaching failure There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not
Ollivander Primitive types are not your friends Really. Stop (ab)using just strings and integers! Yes, they're the building blocks of whatever you do. But if you abuse them, you're not taking full advantage of your Object Oriented programming language.
Ollivander Enabling Process vs Bureaucratic Process The Process, today, is king. There're a lot of people focusing just on process, and a lot of them hold it as The True Solution to all the world's problems. Then, there're those
Mostly Unixish badblocks: test your mass storage! Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros and in macOS if you install the
Mostly Unixish Automated cleanup of Docker leavings As much as I like Docker, one thing it doesn't do well: cleanup whatever is left on my hard drive after running it for a while. There're generally two kinds of Docker Waste:
Ollivander Python: discover the type of an object This seems a simple enough question: How can I discover the type of any given Python object? Suppose Python 2.7 (Python 3 is a different beast on this topic), and try implementing
Ollivander Git Flow is superflous and complex Some years ago, a git workflow model called git-flow took the software development world by storm. I'd always thought that the workflow was far too complex and I couldn't figure out what purpose
Mostly Unixish Python requests SSL and InsecurePlatformWarning Every now and then, when using Python 2.7 < 2.7.9 and trying to access SSL resources, especially through the requests toolkit, which seems to trigger the issue frequently - but
Ollivander Parkinson's law and estimates Each and every time I think about Parkinson's law, I think that Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a sort of genius, who could gain a great insight into people's heads. For the few that
Mostly Unixish chmod and the capital X This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, e.g. something like 700 for directories
Mostly Unixish Kill Me Softly: killing a process The Right Way I was tired of repeating the same old pattern. Send a kill signal. Check with pgrep. Did the process exit? Send a kill -9. Now all my knowledge has been permanently dumped here:
Mostly Unixish Unfreezing your desktop: when Compiz goes wrong A desktop freeze is something that's not so rare nowadays - that's not good, but we shouldn't get desperate about that. I like Compiz with Unity Desktop on my Ubuntu Trusty very much;
Mostly Unixish Don't give a shell to system users - use su I seem very ancientwisdom-oriented these days. Sometimes you've got a system user on your linux server that's used to run a specific service; it's a good practice to employ those users to achieve
Mostly Unixish SSH hostnames configuration and shortcuts This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@someextremelylong.andimpossibiletotype.anderrorprone.hostname.com or, worse
Mostly Unixish I wish sudo would ask for my password less often This is a very old trick, but I find many people doesn't know about it yet. If you're using sudo (and you definitely should), one minor complaint is that you need to re-enter
Mostly Unixish Ubuntu: faster release upgrade It might be high time to update to the latest Ubuntu 14.04. I think that the upgrade process that is provided by Canonical is slightly underoptimal: if you're using a local mirror
Ollivander Python Packaging Woes: part 3 A bit of wrap-up after part 1 and part 2 Current state of the things I seem to have missed something: there's now a very active Python Packaging Authority which is trying very
Mostly Unixish Keep your tomcat instance up-to-date, and keep apps and configuration tidy. UPDATED: 26th January 2015, with Tomcat 8 support. Today I'm gonna share something that I figured out some times ago: how do I keep my tomcat installation up to date on my servers?
Mostly Unixish Puppet Http Source for files Sometimes you would like to use an http URL as the source file for puppet; while it's being discussed since long, no implementation has been created so far. Of course it would be
Mostly Unixish Quick log for bash scripts, with line limit Sometimes you need to write a quick shell script; many a time, you need to put it on a server, and launch it every now and then, or run it in a cron
Ollivander Python Packaging Woes - part 2 Check out part 1 for my thoughts on what packaging and dependency management should be. I forgot about this post and left it in a draft state for quite a lot of time,
Ollivander One Assertion Per Test Considered Ambiguous There's a practice of good programming which is often referred as One Assertion Per Test. In the opinion of some people, this practice would advocate the usage of a single call to xunit
Mostly Unixish apt-get update: fixing 'package index files are corrupted' Sometimes when performing your daily apt-get update, you'll experience messages like E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. or The package index files are corrupted Such messages
Mostly Unixish Wmctrl: gather and focus your chosen window by hotkey I find it extremely handy to be able to recall my windows by just using the keyboard. It's pretty easy to do in Linux, just use: wmctrl -x -R <WM_CLASS>
Ollivander Python Packaging woes - part 1 This is a spinoff from my Europython 2012 talk (video, slides). Some days ago I got involved in a brief discussion on the topic, so here's what I think about Python packaging and
Ollivander PHP Killer Features I don't like php, and I've got my reasons. I've met a lot of people who dislike PHP and don't see how possibly anyone, anyhow, could think about ever using PHP in any
Mostly Unixish ssh-copy-id with nonstandard sshd port UPDATE: modern ssh-copy-id often support a -p parameter for the port. So this trick is unnecessary and won't probably work. ssh-copy-id is a cool script which is usually distributed along openssh client nowadays;
Mostly Unixish ssh client: stopping key verification complaints inside your own private network If you develop enough software, most probably you'll have a test/development network at your service. In such networks, which are usually handled through a virtualization infrastructure, machines come and go very quickly.
Mostly Unixish Thunderbird temporary directory Whenever you use Thunderbird on Linux you may encounter one annoying behaviour. If you open a message which is got an attachment - you just need to open the message, not to save
Mostly Unixish Disown is your friend Bash builtin disown is a not-so-well known [job control command] http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Job-Control-Builtins.html), and yet it's an extremely useful one. So what? You've started a
Ollivander Unicode and Encoding: Python vs Java Shootout, part 2 So, here we come to our second part; if you did miss the first, it's there. All of the following discussion is relative to Sun Java 6, but most details - if not
Mostly Unixish Purging outdated kernels on systems with unattended-upgrades Whenever I install a production system/server I tend to enable full automatic updating, because it's usually better that something breaks because of a failed update rather than leaving a production machine unpatched;
Mostly Unixish Dropbox and Mercurial: and lived happily ever after Some days ago I ranted about an issue I had with Mercurial and Dropbox; basically, I did put a mercurial repo in a dropbox folder, and ended up with this kind of mess
Ollivander Unicode and encoding: Python vs Java shootout, part 1 Before going on with this post, be sure you've read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - otherwise, I won't be able
Ollivander Jetbrains IDEs: dock-aware launcher for Linux UPDATE:Most of this is pointless on IDEA >= 11 and PyCharm >= 2, since a Tools -> Create desktop entry menu now exists and will let you do everything my launcher
Ollivander Deploy any Java webapp via war to Heroku Heroku Java support is something I longed for, but they apparently don't support deploying a plain, old war file to Heroku. I don't like that; I've got my own continuous integration setup, and
Ollivander Mock Javamail primer Small primer for mock javamail, a pretty useful project that will be handy whenever you need to test code that uses POP3/IMAP/SMTP and you wouldn't like to build wrappers for anything
Ollivander Unit testing with Twisted: testing protocols I had some hard time when testing Twisted protocols. Although they should be decoupled from factories, most examples I could find, including those from the official doc, were just too noisy and suggested
Ollivander Building a successful community-driven software project: part 4 This is a multipart post. See part 3Just a brief conclusion to my post sequence; the three principles for succeeding at community-driven projects are:Make it easy for the people to give you
Ollivander Using trial as test runner with zc.buildout I've found a good way to launch tests using Twisted Trial in a zc.buildout enabled project. I was in fear of needing a full-fledged recipe - which I didn't have the time
Ollivander PyCharm, RubyMine and IDEA linux desktop entries UPDATED: IDEA entry.UPDATED: Automatic agent add script.I'm starting to like both PyCharm and RubyMine, two IDEs from IntelliJ, along with IDEAI had some problems while they were both running on Linux
Ollivander Building a successful community-driven software project: part 3 This is a multipart post. See part 26. State your missionWhat's your project for? Who should use it? Which platform is designed for? Answer those questions somewhere in your project page. You
Ollivander Building a successful community-driven software project: part 2 This is a multipart article - link to part 13. Make it easy to report issues.Yes, your software is got a bug. Never thought about it, didn't you? And here it is.
Ollivander Building a successful community-driven software project: part 1 There's a lot of buzz about open source software lately. Many projects are supposed to embrace the Bazaar development model, but they really don't, and their leaders just seem to ignore users a
Ollivander Apple and OpenJDK: was I wrong? Apple has announced it will contribute to the OpenJDK project, so there's probably no risk that MacOS-specific pieces of the current JDK will be lost. Probably the next, Oracle-backed JDK will be just
Ollivander Why Apple Should Not Ditch Java I'm not an hardcore Apple user. My first Apple product ever was a Macbook Pro I bought about one year ago.But I fell in love with the Mac platform, and I think