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 your password quite often. One common pseudo-solution is to completely disable
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 which can provide a very fast download of all packages, they'll
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 hard to push Python packaging in the right direction, so that
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? Of course I'm not willing to automatically switch majors, but I'd
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 better to periodically download the file from its http source to
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 job. That script may end up doing something important and/or
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, I'm sorry! How Python messed it up A Diaspora of Tools
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 assert method for each test. I think that idea is plainly
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 usually don't go away for quite a long time, and may
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> you can find the WM_CLASS of any window using this
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 dependency management: it's in a very bad state, requires a lot
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 real-world project out there, and simply dismiss PHP as a crap
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; it performs an automatic install of your local public SSH key
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. But ssh clients are usually unhappy about that: alan@melquiades:/etc/
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 the attachment! - Thunderbird will place such attachment in our temporary
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 remote ssh session, launched some command which is taking very, very
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 every detail - is still valid for Java 7 and 8.
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; and if you pick a rather stable distribution (Centos or Ubuntu
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 Mercurial repos inside Dropbox are not a great idea after all.
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 to solve your issues.Sometimes Java fans just say that Python
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 did. You'll need to reinstall it at every update - or
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 I want to compile my files on my own box -
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 you need to test - javamail does not really offer interfaces
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 using a factory.I don't like that approach - I should
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 their feedback - it's highly valuable.Listen and reply to people's