Alan's amusing and surprising homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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;

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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,

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

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

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>

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

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

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;

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.

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

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

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

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;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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