27 March, 2008 – 10:45 pm
When working on my bzr-avahi plugin, Robert asked me about how it should fit in with his bzr-dbus plugin. The two plugins offer complementary features, and could share a fair bit of infrastructure code. Furthermore, by not cooperating, there is a risk that the two plugins could break when both installed together.
Given the […]
As most developers know, Valgrind is an invaluable tool for finding memory leaks. However, when debugging Python programs the pymalloc allocator gets in the way.
There is a Valgrind suppression file distributed with Python that gets rid of most of the false positives, but does not give particularly good diagnostics for memory allocated through pymalloc. […]
Yesterday I bottled the honey bock that has been brewing over the last week. This one was made with the following ingredients:
A Black Rock Bock beer kit.
1kg of honey
500g of Dextrose
Caster sugar for carbonation
The only difference from the standard procedure was replacing part of the brewing sugar with honey. Before being added, the […]
Marc uploaded a new revision of the Python DB-API 2.0 Specification yesterday that documents the new two phase commit extension that I helped develop on the db-sig mailing list.
My interest in this started from the desire to support two phase commit in Storm – without that feature there are far fewer occasions where its ability […]
19 February, 2008 – 3:36 pm
At Canonical, one of the approaches taken to accelerate development is to hold coding sprints (otherwise known as hackathons, hackfests or similar). Certain things get done a lot quicker face to face compared to mailing lists, IRC or VoIP.
When collaborating with someone at one of these sprints the usual way to let others look […]
18 February, 2008 – 1:13 pm
The following article discusses ideas that I wouldn’t even class as vapourware, as I am not proposing to implement them myself. That said, the ideas should still be implementable if anyone is interested.
One well known security weakness in OpenID is its weakness to phishing attacks. An OpenID authentication request is initiated by the […]
12 February, 2008 – 1:54 pm
Nicolas: Your metaclass example is a good example of when not to use metaclasses. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is executed slightly different to how you expect. Let’s look at how Foo is evaluated, starting with what’s written:
class Foo:
__metaclass__ = FooMeta
This is equivalent to the following assignment:
Foo […]
17 December, 2007 – 1:48 pm
On the weekend, I had my first encounter with allocated seating at the Greater Union Innaloo cinemas.
As usual, we’d bought tickets separately. It wasn’t until going in to the actual cinema that a staff member said that we were expected to sit in seats scattered around the cinema (one of which was on the […]
10 December, 2007 – 2:57 pm
Over the weekend, I spent a number of hours tracking down a bug caused by the cache in the Python urlparse module. The problem has already been reported as Python bug 1313119, but has not been fixed yet.
First a bit of background. The urlparse module does what you’d expect and parses a URL […]
10 December, 2007 – 12:38 pm
It looks like the OpenID Authentication 2.0 specification has finally been released, along with OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0. While there are some questionable features in the new specification (namely XRIs), it seems like a worthwhile improvement over the previous specification. It will be interesting to see how quickly the new specification gains adoption.
While […]