http://pieceofpy.com A static blog engine/compiler Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:29:42 GMT Blogofile hourly 1 http://pieceofpy.com/2010/12/16/migrating-to-blogofile/ Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:23:02 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=375 Migrating to Blogofile http://pieceofpy.com/2010/12/16/moving-by-blog-back/ Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:22:24 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=373 Moving by blog back! pieceofpy.com My personal stuff will now be on Riotous Living! which is a much better platform for all the crazy stuff I do that isn't tech related. Thanks for putting up with all my shifting and moving around!]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2010/01/20/what-i-look-for-in-a-job/ Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:13:55 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=322 What I Look For In A Job

Refreshing

Excitement

Vision

Caring

Refreshing What do I mean by refreshing? I mean a company that isn't doing what everyone else. Something that isn't YAIC (Yet Another Internet Company). For me, this can really mean two things though. It could also mean a company that produces software for an industry I've never worked in before, but ideally it is a company doing something new, innovative, and refreshing. At the end of the day, writing software for them makes you go "Ahhhhhhhhhh". Excitement I want everyone in the company I am working for to be jacked about working there. I want people to be excited about the products. Even if they are boring everyday products. If everyone there is excited about them and cares about them it promotes a much better work environment and in my experience a higher quality product. Vision Here's where we are. Here's where we are going. Here is how WE are gonna do it. This seems as one of those things that is so easily over looked once you're out of lets keep this startup from dying working 100 hours a week mode, but even for established companies this is so important. Without a vision your company will eventually end up stuck in the mud. Caring This is more in the human respect. We are sometimes at work more than we are at home. This is especially the case with small companies and start-ups (and even some big ones). Companies that care, have employees that care. Treating employees like cattle will only result in employees treating the company like a feed station. Every place I've worked that did mandatory start / end times or mandatory OT always had issues getting coverage and had huge turn over rates compared to flex time locations with resources for employees to relax, take breaks, and feel cared about. ]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2009/04/09/i-need-a-new-theme/ Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:17:34 EDT http://pieceofpy.com/index.php/2009/04/09/i-need-a-new-theme/ I Need a New Theme http://pieceofpy.com/2009/03/13/jython-25-and-snakefight-for-deploying-pylons-w-sqlalchemy-oracle/ Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:42:34 EDT http://pieceofpy.com/?p=254 Jython 2.5 and snakefight for deploying Pylons w/ SQLAlchemy + Oracle. UPDATE / 13 March 2009: snakefight 0.3 now has a --include-jar option, prefer that to using my hack. After reading P. Jenvey's blog post about Deploying Pylons Apps to Java Servlet Containers I immediately downloaded the Jython 2.5 beta and installed snakefight to give it a try. One of our services where I work is a Pylons based application. It is deployed using paster and Apache ProxyPass. Our main application is written in Java and is deployed as a war under Jetty. So if I can get my Pylons application built as a war and deployed that way, it would greatly simplify our deployment process. [sourcecode language="bash"] $ sudo /opt/jython25/bin/easy_install snakefight $ /opt/jython25/bin/jython setup.py develop $ /opt/jython25/bin/jython setup.py bdist_war --paster-config dev_r2.ini ... output of success and stuff ... $ cp dist/project-0.6.8dev.war /opt/jetty/webapps [/sourcecode] Now I visit my local server and hit the project context. I get some database errors, kind of expected them. So for the time being, I'll be running this directly using Jython to speed up the debugging process. A quick googling of my DB issues turns up zxoracle for SQLalchemy which uses Jython zxJDBC. I install that in to sqlalchemy/databases as zxoracle.py and give it another go. Changing the oracle:// lines in my .ini file to now read zxoracle:// Now it can't find the 3rd party Oracle libraries (ojdbc.jar). [sourcecode] $ cd ./dist $ jar xf project-0.6.8dev.war $ cd WEB-INF/lib $ ls # no ojdbc.jar as expected ... $ cd ~/project $ export CLASSPATH=/opt/jython25/jython.jar:/usr/lib/jvm/java/jre/lib/ext/ojdbc.jar $ /opt/jython25/bin/jython /opt/jython25/bin/paster serve --reload dev_r2.ini [/sourcecode] Now it is looking a little better and it able to find the jar, but still a DB issue, now with SQLalchemy library. Not having a ton of time to investigate, I decide to try rolling back my SQAlachemy version for Jython. Turns out rolling back to 0.5.0 fixed the issue. I'll be investigating why it was breaking with 0.5.2 soon (tm). So now I rerun it, and get a new error. [sourcecode lang="bash"] AttributeError: 'ZXOracleDialect' object has no attribute 'optimize_limits' [/sourcecode] I decide I am just going to go in to the zxoracle.py and add optimize_limits = False to the ZXOracleDialect. No idea what this breaks or harms, but I do it anyway and rerun the application. Success! Every thing is working now. No liking the idea of having to manually insert the Oracle jar in to the WEB-INF/lib and not really wanting to much around with environment variables, I also implemented a quick and dirty include-java-libs for snakefight, the diff for command.py is below. This allows me to pass in a : separated list of jars to include in the WEB-INF/lib. EDIT: The diff I posted isn't needed since I put it on my hg repo. You can grab it from here. So now I am back to building my war. Just as before. [sourcecode lang="bash"] $ /opt/jython25/bin/jython setup.py bdist_war --paste-config dev_r2.ini --include-java-libs /opt/jython25/extlibs/ojdbc.jar running bdist_war creating build/bdist.java1.6.0_12 creating build/bdist.java1.6.0_12/war creating build/bdist.java1.6.0_12/war/WEB-INF creating build/bdist.java1.6.0_12/war/WEB-INF/lib-python running easy_install project adding eggs (to WEB-INF/lib-python) adding jars (to WEB-INF/lib) adding WEB-INF/lib/jython.jar adding Paste ini file (to dev_r2.ini) adding Paste app loader (to WEB-INF/lib-python/____loadapp.py) generating deployment descriptor adding deployment descriptor (WEB-INF/web.xml) created dist/project-0.6.8dev-py2.5.war $ cp dist/project-0.6.8dev-py2.5.war /opt/jetty/webapps $ sudo /sbin/service jetty restart [/sourcecode] And presto! I am in business. My pylons application is deployed under Jetty and all the selenium functional tests are passing. I am sure there is probably a easier, neater, or cleaner way to do all this, but this was my first iteration through and also my first time ever deploying a WAR to a java servlet container so all in all I am happy with the results. Performance seems about the same as when running the application with paster serve, but Jetty does use a little more memory than before (expected I guess).]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2009/03/12/i-didnt-want-those-changes-anyway/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:48:21 EDT http://pieceofpy.com/?p=238 I didn't want those changes anyway. Mercurial) for version control. Since switching to hg I have adopted the following process. I also do this for my Git projects at work.

• I create a local branch to working.
• I setup my External Tools in Eclipse to run my test suite.
• The output of my test suite gets committed to my local branch.
• I squash the local branch messages when I merge in to master.
• I add some insightful commit message for my master commit. Like, I haz changes.

So yesterday, I roll up my sleeves and prepare to dive in to an older project that smells like rotten potatoes. The plan of attack is to take this project and bring it up-to-date with Python 2.6, Pylons 0.9.7, and SQLalchemy 0.5.2 in the process of doing it, re-factor and extend where needed, of course letting the tests drive. I start my work and wand waving and 2-3 hours in I've removed about 200 lines of cruft and copy paste inheritance extended flexibility by further encapsulating some behavior using the Strategy pattern. I've got 47 tests (including functional doctests) passing and I'm green bar and happy with my time spent. So now time to merge this baby back in to master. My test suite external tool performs the hg add . and I keep my .hgignore pretty up-to-date for Python projects, so I feel confident doing that. I open up the terminal to check out the change sets and start the merge and I notice I missed a binary format in my .hgignore. So I now have about 15 unwanted files staged for adding. Being lazy and knowing my last commit was when I just ran my test suite, I blindly run. [sourcecode lang="bash"] $ ^R hg revert (Ctrl-R, hg revert - shell previous command search) $ hg revert -a --no-backup # ...my work being destroyed because I was lazy and not paying attention # whimpering [/sourcecode] It is at this point my day goes from great to awful. I face palm as I watch the uncommitted changes I've been making over the last 3 hours get reverted. As I mentioned, this project was older, in fact, it was started before the migration to hg and I never updated the External Tools runnable for this project in Eclipse to do the new hg add / commits. So every time I thought I was committing when I was running the tests, I was in fact not. Fortunate for me, I did have some buffers open and was able to recover the end result in about 45 minutes of hacking, but I did lose all of my change history which was very very disappointing (not to mention scary). So if I had any advice after this it would be ensure your older projects are up-to-date with how you do things now and they follow your current development process before you start refactoring. I guess the oneliner could be; When refactoring a project start with the tool set first.]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2008/12/28/holidays-and-new-server/ Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:37:17 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=222 Holidays and New Server

3.2GHz P4 Core Duo2

2GB Memory

36GB 15k SCSI (Mirrored)

500GB monthly transfer

]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2008/12/03/another-try-at-a-blog-a-day/ Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:21:15 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=213 Another try at a blog a day? American Lion. Excellent book about Andrew Jackson.]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2008/11/05/exercise-even-a-programmer-can-do/ Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:51:32 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=210 Exercise even a programmer can do. Every morning I do this right after eating breakfast 2 sets, push-ups, 30 sec OR failure 2 sets, scissor kicks, 1 minute OR failure Monday through Saturday 2 minute warm up 20 minutes of cardio (140-160 heart rate, check with your Dr.) 2 minute cool down Strength training This adds another 20 minutes to my workout, so schedule for that Monday - Push (chest, triceps) Wednesday - Pull (bicep, shoulders) Friday - Legs (legs and stomach) Now, it is just habit. Also, I am sure there is some study somewhere to prove or disprove this, but I find it makes my mind much sharper. I am more alert through out the day and I sleep much better at night. Not to mention clothes fitting better and just feeling better. My personal goal is 250. Python tip Prefer xrange to range when you need an arbitrary number of iterations as range actually generates a list for you, this will consume memory and be more costly than xrange. ]]> http://pieceofpy.com/2008/11/04/voting-and-the-land-of-ice-and-snow/ Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:20:13 EST http://pieceofpy.com/?p=206 Voting and the land of ice and snow. Snippet of Python In an effort to always have something a little Python related in all my posts, here is how to use list comprehension to filter out no value items from a list. [sourcecode language="python"] foo = ["A", "", "C", None, "E"] bar = [i for i in foo if i] print bar ['A', 'C', 'E'] [/sourcecode] ]]>