Monday 24 December 2007

Safari 3 still leaks memory on Google Reader

After my one-week rss detox, I was not surprised to find a 1000+ counter on my google reader. However, I couldn't digest it all an once due to (well, due to the enourmous amount of posts, but also due to) safari's memory usage growing from 17 to 250 Mb by the simple act of scrolling. As it turns out, they know about the bug already, and, well, tried to fix it. But if I understood well, they didn't succeed :/

Wednesday 12 December 2007

Rails, Rake, TestTask and Perversion of Control

Here's the story. Rake is a ruby-based DSL for building tasks. It's heavily used by Ruby on Rails, especially for database maintenance and testing. One of its use for testing is a use for testing _plugins_. The way rails does it is, well... let's say brings a few surprises.
To run the tests of all plugins you enter command rake test:plugins, to run the test of a single plugin you provide an environment viariable using this syntax rake test:plugins PLUGIN=plugin_name. Now, to write a rake task that runs a subset of tests, and does some additional job, you'd set the variable from within your code and programatically invoke the test task.
And this is what's not working. The problem is - all test tasks are evaluated before reading your file, and stored as a data. The particular task for running plugins simply generates all paths and stores it all in a huge hash (dictionary). After finding this out, all I was left to do was to copy rails' inner solution into my code. I don't like it much, though...

Tuesday 11 December 2007

Someone take me to USA, please?

I'm surprised I managed to blog about this sooner than Michael, but the list of approved PyCon talks has been published, and two of Resolver proposals got in! Congratulations!

The other thing is - with each lecture I read about I felt even worse on not attending the conference. They should forbid organising too awesome events in States:/

In desperate try to collect money for the flight, I added some google adverts to my blog. I switched also the feed to short form. Let me know if that's too irritating :)

Errata: Apparently, In excitement I missed the fact that actually there are going to be three resolver talks on PyCon.

Friday 7 December 2007

What's your google chart?

I decided to try out google new charting API. It's use is pretty straightforward - you simply a regular GET request and receive the chart in response. The nice part of it is sending actual values - you encode them as strings, so here's "helloWorld"

With strings you say? Let's check it!

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=200x125&chd=s:abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz


Cool. So, what's the picture for my name?


P.S. Forgot to mention before: Resolver Beta is out!

Thursday 6 December 2007

Cool!

rigmor:~ konrad$ easy_install antigravity
Searching for antigravity
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/antigravity/
Reading http://fabien.schwob.org/antigravity/
Best match: antigravity 0.1
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/a/antigravity/antigravity-0.1.zip#md5=371367b1f429f8fe19857c5eef1de491
Processing antigravity-0.1.zip
Running antigravity-0.1/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-pBpmRT/antigravity-0.1/egg-dist-tmp-megUd7
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
Adding antigravity 0.1 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/antigravity-0.1-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for antigravity
Finished processing dependencies for antigravity
rigmor:~ konrad$

Wednesday 5 December 2007

PWNED!

Yep, looks like my toy automata project needs no further work. Someone has already done it (reddited yesterday).