Python doesn't assign values to variables, it binds names to values.

Need to write that on a stickynote and attach it to my monitor.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:05 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

We hates Python scoping rules. We hates them forever.

(Currently going for a doc crawl on the theory that it can't be that broken.)

Huh.

Okay, the problem I'm having involves modules, threads, and thread-specific global data. I haven't solved the problem with modules yet, but it turns out there was some magic added to Python 2.4 for thread-specific globals (threading.local). That's a comfort, because I knew that worked, but I couldn't figure out how. CherryPy, the web framework I'm using, supports this under 2.3, but it turns out that it's a hack and it's very slow. So I'm not going mad. Or at least, no more than usual.

I'm moving Minx from the test design, where it is a single CGI program (and so each request is perfectly isolated and I can slap the code together any which way) to production, as a multi-threaded persistent server. Which is much more fiddly in terms of structuring the code and variables, but is twenty to thirty times faster.

Up to 95% of the time taken by the CGI version is overhead: starting a shell, then starting a Python interpreter, loading the twenty or so libraries used, opening a connection to MySQL, and so on. The multi-threaded version does all of that once. (Or at worst, once per thread, for a persistent thread pool.) It also uses Psyco, the Python compiler, which adds a 30% to 50% speed boost for this sort of app. For the CGI version, Psyco takes long enough to do the compile that the overall performance is worse in most cases...

Only because the threads weren't actually isolated from one another, it didn't work at all. I could either add an extra parameter to all the roughly 100 functions I've written so far, or I could work out how to do thread-specific globals.

Update: Okay, all is forgiven. The threading.local trick works flawlessly, even with modules. Threading-local global data for one module is not visible in another, but even if that complicates things for me, that's right. They're modules, not include files. So I have thread-local module-local global variables... Yay!

Update: And it works perfectly with CherryPy. I expected that, because it only makes sense that CherryPy would be using the standard threading module, but there's a difference between being the only sensible way to do something and actually testing it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:34 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Your results:
You are Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman 75% Green Lantern 65% Spider-Man 65% Robin 55% Supergirl 55% Catwoman 50% The Flash 50% Hulk 50% Iron Man 45% Superman 40% Batman 30%

You are a beautiful princess with great strength of character.

Yes, I cheated. Of course I cheated. I got Spider Man. Twice.

(via Shamus T. Young)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:15 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 It's pretty sad that you can score 100% as Spiderman by answering only five questions, all with a strong yes. Even sadder that they're all together: "Are you an intelligent geek?", "Do you like redheads?", "Are you accident prone?", "Are you a hopeless romantic?", and "Do you have a good sense of humor?".

If you don't answer any questions at all, you're 20% Batman...

-j

Posted by: J Greely at July 07, 2006 04:34 PM (0/vcb)

2 You are Hulk .
You are a wanderer with
amazing strength.


Well, that would explain why I'm always yelling "Grraahg!!! Talldave ANGRY!! Talldave SMASH!!"

Posted by: TallDave at July 08, 2006 01:39 AM (ov0t/)

3 Are you in charge of mu.nu comments? If so, lil miss attila's are failing with the error:

An error occurred:

Invalid [] range "i-b" in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/-casino|-com.com|-mobile-phones.org|-online\.com|-online\.net|-replica\.|-site.info|.+diamond.+os.com|.+shemale.com|.25936.ro|.659459.ro/|.alic2004.org/|.i-shake-u.com/|.ihateapple.com/|.info/skanah01|.loansmarter.com/lendingtree.php|.pridezone.org/|.votegrowinggreener.org/|0-poker.biz|0.allineare.com|00.allineare.com|007.nubibianche.com|007box.de|007google.info|00pro.com|010.allineare.com|014.guerredellastella.com|015.ambrato.com|03.bruciarsi.com|03 at extlib/jayallen/Blacklist.pm line 3098.


If you aren't, sorry to bother you.

Posted by: Kevin at July 08, 2006 05:45 AM (++0ve)

4 Out of curiosity, Pixy, you've said you're playing Oblivion... what sort of rig are you running?
WAYYYY off topic, I know, but...

Oh, and I was Green Lantern.

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 08, 2006 09:27 AM (zBXYv)

5 Was playing Oblivion. Then I realised that I hate it.

Xbox 360 version.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 08, 2006 10:42 AM (O0soJ)

6
Hrm. Well, that's certainly not encouraging. T'anks, Pixy!

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 08, 2006 02:35 PM (+FLIL)

7 i got 100% supergrrl AND catwoman.
of course, who i really am is not on the quiz.

Posted by: Nishizono shinji at July 10, 2006 05:43 AM (fj7wj)

8 wait...this quiz is broken!
how can i possibly be 100% badgrrl and 100% goodgrrl at the same time?

Posted by: nishizono shinji at July 10, 2006 08:23 AM (fj7wj)

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Insty:

TO THE STARS: A new foundation aimed at promoting faster-than-light travel. Give generously, especially if you're really rich.

"The strategy of the Foundation will be to cover the whole span of ambitions, but with cycles of short-term, affordable investigations that target the most important questions. This span includes the seemingly simple concept of solar sails to the seemingly impossible goal of faster-than-light travel, to hedge the bets."

* Successful demonstration defined as Pixy Misa using said drive to travel backwards** in time and earn at least two trillion dollars from compound interest and market investments.
** And yes, it has to be backwards in time. I can communicate forwards in time just fine. See here and here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:49 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Love, Australia.

P.S. Don't mean to nag, but if you get a chance could you please return the lawnmower? Ta. Oz.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:29 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I just kicked off the download for Keroro Gunso episode 27. I'd thought it was a standard 26-episode series.

Apparently not.

52 then? Um...

Would you believe 114 and counting?

Don't know how good it is beyond the first few episodes, though. (I did quite enjoy the first few episodes, but then the fansubs stopped. They've started up again - from a different group, and at a rapid pace - but I haven't gotten back to it yet.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:26 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Back in April, author Dan Simmons (Hyperion series, Ilium, Hardcase and others) wrote a cautionary tale about - as his character termed it - the Century War, the Long war With Islam.

If you're reading this little blog, then most likely you have read essayists like Steven Den Beste and Bill Whittle, or at least the news and opinion sites like Instapundit and Little Green Footballs, or if not that, then some history, so if (like me) you had followed the links and read that story (it was framed as fiction, sort of; truth framed as fiction framed as truth) you would have nodded your head and skipped forward a little and said, Yes, yes. I know that, but it's always good to see another one who sees the dangers.

What Simmons didn't see, it appears, is the wilful blindness and vitriol of those who do not wish to see the world as it is. His response to the (predictable) outpouring of bile is a much longer and more tightly reasoned* essay. Read it. Admittedly, the people who do read it will largely not be those who most need to read it, but read it anyway.

* Not that the original story wasn't tightly reasoned, it's just that the reasoning was opaque to many readers. This essay brings the facts and reasoning to the front.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Jawa Report is back up on a new server, at least if you're not in Europe, a large chunk of which has been firewalled off.

The rest of munu is largely stable, although there are a lot minor issues left after all the messing about I had to do during the attack.

I still have two broken computers, but that means I still have two working computers. (Well, two working computers that I am actively using.) I'll get the broken ones fixed sooner or later.

And I had nothing that I had to do today. Lots of things to do, but nothing that had to be done today. For the first time in a month, I didn't have some critical emergency to deal with.

I slept in. I read Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice (not unflawed, but eminently readable). I have a million things to do tomorrow, but that's tomorrow.

And now I'm going to go and beat up some girls. (The first reviewer on that page has it pretty much right. Good game, lots of fun, but could have been a lot better.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:07 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just thought I'd mention that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 PM | Comments (369) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

There are a million files on my notebook, and it had to eat cookies.txt?

Grr.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

This site may hiccup a little, because I'm converting it to Minx.

Do not panic!

It doesn't help.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:22 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

WTF Overload - Posting pictures of the cutest programming screwups from all over the world.
SlashDigg - An automated, user-recommended, real-time distributed denial of service attack.
PunditSpace - The place for teenage political commentators to expand their social networks.
Blogr - It's a blogging system - only now you can draw boxes around parts of people's posts and leave pointless one-word comments in them.
IRDB - The internet rack database. Know you've seen a particular pair before, but can't remember where? This site has it all, including an innovative 3D indexing system.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:28 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 It would be almost worth setting up an actual website for some of those suggestions.

Posted by: Andrew at June 27, 2006 04:05 PM (RWEVY)

2 A few years ago someone actually tried to do something like what you called "Blogr". It was a browser plugin which accessed a database on a central server. You could add comments to a web site, and anyone else using the browser plugin could see them. And the actual site owner couldn't do a damned thing about it.

As to IRDB, I bet there actually is something like that out there...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 27, 2006 04:30 PM (+rSRq)

3 So... what makes a programming screwup cute?

Posted by: HC at June 28, 2006 06:48 AM (E1/LX)

4
Hello Kitty.

Posted by: Wonderduck at June 28, 2006 07:12 AM (+rGmJ)

5 So IRDB would have pictures of the 19" frameworks full of servers at my ISP?

Posted by: triticale at July 01, 2006 11:19 AM (wp0qn)

6 IRDB

Until then, there's... Cats and Racks(tm)!

Posted by: TallDave at July 06, 2006 05:45 AM (cIaQ+)

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If you believe in astrology, you are an idiot.

More than that: If you believe that astrology might sometimes work, might have a kernel of truth to it, is anything other than a two-thousand-year-old scam feeding off a five-thousand-year-old blunder, then you are an idiot.

Thank you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:56 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Bill Keller, editor of the bleedin' New York Times:

It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press.

The founders recognised a pre-existing freedom, and wrote the Bill of Rights to protect that freedom:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That pillock Keller again:

The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly.

Draping yourself in the Constitution at this point is not going to convince anyone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:16 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

SESSION is an associative array (aka Dictionary). When the session times out, things like 'Tempfile' are no longer defined. (PHP has an unset() function that undefines a reference.) But when PHP sees an undeclared reference, it doesn't error out -- instead it substitutes '' (a blank string) if the reference occurs within a string. So now the user is executing

rm -r /var/public_www/

As you might imagine, this behavior makes PHP very dangerous in the hands of an idiot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:25 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Ahh, the Daily WTF. And I agree with several of the commenters in that thread...what, exactly, was the brainstorm that resulted in a 'rm -r' call in code in the first place

Posted by: Chris C. at June 27, 2006 01:23 AM (V5vg4)

2 And my buddy, Dr. Heinous, wonders why I'm very, very leery of trying
to learn enough PHP to actually work under the hood of WP. I
understood a little of that -- on about the fourth reading. Not
that I know a php SESSION from a gaming session. Well, maybe I
dimly grasped it when I played with .asp a few years ago, but do I want
to risk my whole site on how well I understand something? No.



'rm' is remove directory? But what's the '-r' parameter do?



Crud, don't tell me that's root? No, wait, www_root is the site root.... recursive maybe? But what's var?



Pardon me while I advertise my ignorance....

Posted by: ubu roi at June 27, 2006 11:35 AM (s/dU4)

3 -r is indeed recursive.

/var is a particular filesystem that the document root really shouldn't be in.

What this little beauty did was whenever a user's session timed out, it deleted the entire web site.

Not, on the whole, a good thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 27, 2006 12:15 PM (FRalS)

4 Well, that's atad excessive.

Posted by: Wonderduck at June 27, 2006 01:39 PM (+FLIL)

5 I kind of thought that might be the effect of "remove recursive" executed in the root, but do you mean to say the user didn't even have to enter anything? Just let his session time out and the order would execute?
Ow.

Posted by: ubu roi at June 27, 2006 02:05 PM (s/dU4)

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Got a moment of piece and watched episode twelve/12 of Haruhi Suzumiya on the new TV, which I'm very happy with. It has the usual contrast issues of LCDs, but not overly so, and the colour and clarity are wonderful.

Need to get my HTPC set up next. I'm typing this on my notebook's keyboard, but using the TV as the screen. Again. it's on VGA so it's not sub-pixel perfect like DVI, but it's more than good enough.

But first: Minx. I'm switching the munu comments system to Minx tomorrow, so there's a bit of tweaking and testing I need to do.

Oh, and a very good episode it was too.

Aargh! Stuck pixel! Stuck pixel! Didn't see it before. Stuck pixel!

Red. It's always red.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:26 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Still having major notebook problems. I've got a 1GB SD card installed at the moment, and I'm saving all my work there rather than the hard disk. It seems to run fine most of the time, but it's a pain in the butt when it needs to boot.

I'll try swapping drives again this weekend.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:57 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

It's not the memory - Memtest-86 gives it a clean bill of health.

It's not the disk - checkdsk runs fine, and my applications have no problems.

Windows says it's a disk problem but it acts like it's a memory problem.

What can cause that?

The pagefile. The evil, good-for-nothing, rat bastard pagefile.

I thought to myself If this were a real operating system, it would have a log of all these errors.

Then I thought, It is a real operating system. A crappy one, but a real OS nonetheless.

And it has crappy log files, but they exist, and they were full of errors - all relating to the pagefile.

As soon as I manage to get the darn thing to boot, I'm going to disable it.

Again. I already disabled it, but it didn't take. Who knows why; this is Windows.

Okay, it finished booting, and now has no pagefile.

Let's see if it crashes.

...

So far, so good. I did get one of those "delayed write failed" errors (so maybe it is the disk after all), but I managed to watch last week's episode of Haruhi Suzumiya on my new TV without anything catching fire, blowing up, crashing, or collapsing into a closed space.

Which is good enough for now.

Tomorrow I send the motherboard from my new PC back for replacement. Then I plan to (finally!) get the forms processing working in Minx. This is an example of what you can do with fairly simple templates; I intend to expand on that. A lot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:19 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Have you tried deleting the pagefile.sys file and re-enabling virtual memory? Or better yet if you have enough space, rename the pagefile.sys and leave it there (and then re-enable virtual memory), in case there is a flaw in your drive where the pagefile is.

For some reason, when you turn off virtual memory, XP doesn't delete the file. Mine got so fouled up that only the above prescription worked. Of course, my drive was so fouled up that even S.M.A.R.T. noticed it

Posted by: Kevin at June 22, 2006 03:34 AM (+hkUo)

2 Delayed writes failed? That sounds like you've got problems in the disk I/O system, whether it is an intermittently failing drive, cable, or ata controller, its hard to say without a better diagnostic than chkdsk. Hmm... I once was having numerous disk problems which turned out to be a bad power supply--the +12V rail was nearly 20% too low and a number of drives really didn't like it to be that low.
.

Posted by: kayle at June 22, 2006 01:35 PM (Qsm1J)

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Corel wrote to me and said, essentially, Yeah, our Paint Shop Pro pricing in Australia sucks. We know, and we're working to fix it, but we're tied up in old distribution contracts.

For those who haven't been following the story: I can download Paint Shop Pro online for $59. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

I can buy it in a box for $79, less a $30 mail-in rebate. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

Because I live in Australia, it costs me two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

But at least they have acknowledged the problem.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:01 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Either not the memory, or not only the memory.

Joy.

Update: Memtest-86 is on the third pass without finding any errors.

Not the memory, then.

Not the disk drive, since I swapped that yesterday and it died within ten minutes.

It happens whether I'm on battery or mains power.

Grr.

Dell is having a sale right now...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:26 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I'm just hoping it was only the memory.

Swapped drives in my notebook: BSOD within 10 minutes.

Pulled out the original 256MB of memory: No BSOD so far.

Windows Explorer has restarted a couple of times, but that is not exactly unusual. I'm going to run another checkdsk, because if the memory was playing up, there could be some nasty things lurking in my filesystem.

No progress on the media centre box; looks like that will have to go back for the friendly folks at EYO to take a look at. I've been buying stuff from them for years, and this is the first time something has just plain not worked. Video cards that don't run under Linux, sure. Network cards that are incompatible with my motherboard, yep. And the Hard Drive Destruction Bunny is always lurking around the next corner. But this is the first time I haven't been able to get a new toy to at least boot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

apotheosis, commenting at Protein Wisdom:

Clara Bow was the IT girl.

Then there came pixie misa. Who has watched server farms glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:28 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Bought a new media centre PC.

It doesn't work.

Oh, and my notebook died about thirty times last night. It may or may not be the hard disk. It was working this morning, but when I got to the office and tried to bring it back from standby it cold booted.

I do have a backup.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Working 15 hour days, 7 days a week, gets to you after a while.

I haven't even watched the latest episode of Haruhi Suzumiya yet.

I have a brand new HDTV, and I haven't watched anything on it.

<Dies.>

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:38 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

DDoSed again.

"Interesting" isn't the term I'd use, though. "Bloody irritating", perhaps.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)