Heureusement \(^-^)/

Still, it has a wooden floor and is in a quiet space – a quite nice place to spend the time after security check.

Railsgirls is an awesome event aimed at teaching non-programming girls and women how to get their ideas implemented.

From railsgirls.com:

Our aim is to give tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas. We do this by providing a great experience on building things and by making technology more approachable.

Learn sketching, prototyping, basic programming and get introduced to the world of technology. Rails Girls was born in Finland, but is nowadays a global, non-profit volunteer community.

Rosebud
Σκουφά 40, Athens

http://m.google.com/u/m/RjIAqD

It’s a quite nice restaurant with good classic music and wine. Feels pretty weird, though, it’s in the posh part of Athens with yuppie clients. Every other small to big Greek restaurant is great for vegans – when Greeks go to a restaurant, they order Meze: a wide variety of distinct foods. The biggest part will be vegetarian by default with a good part of it being vegan. Just don’t order the lamb and you’re good to go for a four hour feast.

However, when I tried using my Swiss card in Greece, it would not work. Asking the teller about it, they told me they were a “different company”. That was not at all obvious, it looked just like any other Starbucks, showing the same Corporate Identity and products. On the desk they had Starbucks cards where I took one to take a photograph comparing the Swiss and Greek card. Honestly, I cannot see a difference other than language.

In conclusion, the Starbucks card is neither like cash, nor does it work in different countries. It’s still nice to use it for refills and every once in a while for a free tea or coffee, but still – lying is bad advertisement.

If you want to use it, please use your terminal to go to the checked out repository and enter the following command:

curl https://gist.github.com/munen/5124033/raw/4e38d1eb1d0e6965a4b031e48e2284d0df15eaab/hange_remote_origin.sh | sh

This will produce output like this:

$ cd ~src/the_tale_of_genji
$ curl https://gist.github.com/munen/5124033/raw/4e38d1eb1d0e6965a4b031e48e2284d0df15eaab/hange_remote_origin.sh | sh
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   375    0   375    0     0    374      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--   465
Showing old remote origin
origin	git@github.com:preek/the_tale_of_genji.git (fetch)
origin	git@github.com:preek/the_tale_of_genji.git (push)
--------
succeeded in setting new remote
--------
Showing new remote origin
origin	git@github.com:munen/the_tale_of_genji.git (fetch)
origin	git@github.com:munen/the_tale_of_genji.git (push)

Abstract:

Whether you’re drawn to chocolate, cookies, potato chips, cheese, or burgers and fries, we all have foods we can’t seem to resist—foods that sabotage our best efforts to lose weight and improve our health. These foods are winning the battle—but that’s because we’re fighting it in the wrong place. As physician and leading health researcher Dr. Neal Barnard explains in his groundbreaking book, Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings— and Seven Steps to End Them Naturally, banishing these cravings is not a question of willpower or psychology— it’s a matter of biochemistry. Based on the author’s research and that of other leading investigators at major universities, his book reveals the diet and lifestyle changes that can break these stubborn craving cycles.

Rheinfall

Download The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra here, there is also a Github repository if there are changes to be made.

Abstract, taken from Wikipedia:

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra (Sanskrit: लंकावतारसूत्र Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra; traditional Chinese: 楞伽經; pinyin: léngqié jīng) is a sutra of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The sūtra recounts a teaching primarily between the Buddha and a bodhisattva named Mahāmati (“Great Wisdom”). The sūtra is set in Laṅkā, the island fortress capital of Rāvaṇa, the king of rākṣasas. The title of this text roughly translates as, “Scripture of the Descent into Laṅkā.”

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra figured prominently in the development of Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism. It is notably an important sūtra in Chinese Chán and its Japanese version, Zen.

Download of The Tale of Genji here, there is also a Github repository if there are changes to be made.

Abstract, taken from Wikipedia:

The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 Genji Monogatari?) is a classic work of Japanese literature written by the Japanese noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu in the early years of the 11th century, around the peak of the Heian period. It is sometimes called the world’s first novel, the first modern novel, the first psychological novel or the first novel still to be considered a classic. Notably, the novel also illustrates a unique depiction of the livelihoods of high courtiers during the Heian period.[1] While universally considered a masterpiece, its precise classification and influence in both Western and Eastern canon has been a matter of debate.

Feel free to brew your own coffee with the new refillable capsules. More ecofriendly, plus you can use the coffee brand you actually like.

Thank you, Sarah!

I shine to make you smile
I try to save you one more time
For the lonely place you need a friendly face
When your options low I lift you from below
[I Shine, Army of Mushrooms]

Das Haus hat zwei helle Badezimmer und sechs Zimmer, welche unter drei Bewohnern aufgeteilt sind, aber auch gemeinsam genutzt werden können. Zusätzlich gibt es eine Sauna, eine Scheune, einen Demeter/Bio-Bauern fünf Minuten entfernt(der jeden Tag im Jahr geöffnet hat), der Dachboden ist für spirituelle Praxis wie Meditation ausgebaut. Miete ist 1666CHF plus geringe Nebenkosten.

Haus von hinten mit Terasse und der eigenen Scheune im Hintergrund.

Blick, sitzend, von der Terasse auf die eigene Wiese. Traumhaft zum lesen, Musik machen/hoeren oder nur zum Haengen.

Kraeutergarten, Feuerstelle, Sitzgelegenheit unter eigenem Wein – direkt vor der Kueche.

Von der privaten Einfahrt aus gesehen. Rechts steht noch eine Scheune, die zum Grundstueck gehoert – mit Gartenwerkzeug und viel Platz fuer Velo oder Auto.

Blick in die Kueche. Ganz links ist ein Schwedenofen, der auch zum Pizza-Backen geeignet ist(;

Sauna im Erdgeschoss

There are sheep beneath my bedrooms window.

I just bought climate compensation packages for the flights I took this year. http://myclimate.ch does wonderful work abroad to create a better world for very small cost – compared to a flight it’s negligible.

The Hippie Way

Greece, sun, drums, books, pen&paper, beaches and hilltops, here I come!

Come to think of me being explicitly not searching for a new home, all of this comes as a big surprise. It seems to me that’s just how the world works.

I bow down in humbleness to whoever and whatever took part in making this possible; meaning all innumerable minute particles that are and have been.

A small first gallery:

Adliswil – first impressions, July 2012

Albino duck

Having given away my physical book collection and my iPad, I welcome thee to my humble belongings, Kindle. May we enjoy each others company to the fullest!

Current books being read: Lankavatara Sutra, Bhagavad Gita and The Power Of Now.

life-dispatched:

Enjoying a beautifully peaceful morning in the hills of Ronco, Italy.

Scouting around; more pictures in the gallery.

For the services I like and use, I usually don’t bother paying for them. But in the case of Dropbox, just no plan seems right. I’m not even talking money here, but storage – the entry plan being 50GB. On my main machine(MBA 11″), I’m running a 128GB SSD – meaning that after having installed all necessary tools, I don’t even have 50GB storage free for things that I want backed up or synched. Since I can’t even physically use the plan properly, I don’t see myself paying for it. I would have been glad to pay for a 10GB or 20GB plan, though.

Not even having 50GB storage might seem very little space to the reader – or for my former self, that is. But for the stuff that I previously needed a NAS or even dedicated servers, I now have the cloud. Mail is on my private server (and backed up), music is on Spotify and Soundcloud, movies are in iTunes. The only thing I’m still hosting and managing myself are pictures.

Still, I wanted more than the 2GB storage that Dropbox offers for free initially. Luckily Dropbox offers up to 16GB extra space for bringing in referrals. Over the last year, I’ve gotten a few people to use Dropbox and got my account up to over 4GB. But then I thought that I could improve this process and set up an AdWords campaign.

Just one day later and having only spent 25USD, my Dropbox account is now 16.8GB.

Here are the details of the campaign. You can see that it only took a day to accumulate enough referrals.

So now I can start putting more files into the bigger Dropbox.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, Dropbox normally grants 250MB per referral. If you own an edu email address, however, they will give you 500MB – even retroactively. If you happen to live outside the USA and your university uses a different TLD, don’t worry – there’s a form to put your address, they will verify it and let you join the edu program.

If you liked this article, please feel free to re-tweet it and let others know.

You should follow me on twitter here

Why did I switch? Let’s just compare two numbers – after that, nothing else needs to be said.

Cold startup time

And that’s without Adobes’ ever annoying “There’s a new Adobe AIR update available” message that pops up every other day and takes another 30s to click through – not counting the inevitable restart of the application afterwards.

Cold Start + searching and playing a song (Paul Kalkbrenner – Aaron)

Mind you, the numbers are including typing the artist and song. Spotify would serve the song right in under 3s if I were to type fast enough. Anyway, there’s a difference of 3 magnitudes in speed!

The benchmark was done on a contemporary Macbook Air with 4GB Ram and SSD, so not the sloppiest machine in the world. 124s to start listening to a song – in other words that’s two friggin’ minutes! I honestly can’t imagine a worse user experience.

Like I proclaimed, nothing else needs to be said.

Switch now and enjoy your life instead of waiting for the music to play!

P.S.: Migrating your existing playlists from Grooveshark to Spotify is made kinda easy with playlistify - so that’s not a reason to hold back.

I will focus on four primary topics: Functional programming, performance, testing and code guidelines. When those four aspects merge in one programmer, he or she will gain greatness no matter what.

Functional programming

Writing code in an imperative style has become the de facto standard. Imperative programs consist of statements that describe change of state. While this might sometimes be a performant way of coding, it sometimes isn’t (for example for sake of complexity) – also, it probably is not the most intuitive way when compared with declarative programming.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s great. Here are some starter articles to get your mind running. But beware, it’s a little like the red pill
- once you tasted functional programming, you don’t want to go back.

• http://www.amk.ca/python/writing/functional
• http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/lambda_functions.hawk
• http://docs.python.org/howto/functional.html

Performance

There’s so much talk going on about how inefficient these ‘scripting languages’ (Python, Ruby, …) are, that it’s easy to forget that very often it’s the algorithm chosen by the programmer that leads to horrible runtime behaviour.

Those articles are a great place to get a feel for the ins and outs of Python’s runtime behaviour, so you can get your high performing application writting in a language that is concise and fun to write. And if your manager asks about Python’s performance, don’t forget to mention that the second largest search engine in the world is run by Python – namely Youtube(see Python quotes).

• http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonIdioms.html
• http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips

Testing

Testing is probably one the most misjudged topics in computer science these days. Some programmers really got it and emphasize TDD(test driven development) and it’s successor BDD(behaviour driven development) whereever possible. Others simply don’t feel it yet and think it’s a waste of time. Well, I’m gonna be that guy and tell you: If you haven’t started out on TDD/BDD yet, you have missed out greatly!

It’s not about introducing a technology to replace that release management automaton in your company that mindlessly clicks through the application once in a while, it is about giving you a tool to deeply understand your own problem domain – to really conquer, manipulate and twist it the way you want and need it to be. If you haven’t yet, give it a shot. These articles will give you some impulses:

• http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/5463
• http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/5584
• http://wiki.cacr.caltech.edu/danse/index.php/Unit_testing_and_Integration_testing
• http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html

Code guidelines

Not all code is created equal. Some can be read and changed by any great programmer out there. But some can only be read and only sometimes changed by the original author – and that maybe only a couple of hours after he or she wrote it. Why is that? Because of missing test coverage (see above) and the lack of proper usage of coding guidelines.

These articles establish an absolute minimum to adhere to. When you follow these, you will write more consise and beautiful code. As a side effect it will be more readable and adaptable by you or anyone else.

• http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
• http://www.fantascienza.net/leonardo/ar/python_best_practices.html

Now go ahead and spread the word. Start with the guy sitting right next to you. Maybe you can go to the next hackathlon or code dojo and start becoming great proficient programmers together!

All the best on your journey.

If you liked this article, please feel free to re-tweet it and let others know.

You should follow me on twitter here

So you know why you should bother reading this article any further: All I need to save to delicious is type two keys inside firefox. Then Delicious pops up, marked text already filled in as note.. you know the Delicious drill. When I’m done typing tags, all I do is hit [enter] again and the URL is saved to Delicious.

So, how do you get this functionality going? First, save the Delicious bookmarklet to your bookmarks. Then the magic happens.

Firefox is able to tag bookmarks with keywords, so it can look them up in the smartbar. We’ll use that functionality in combination with a VIM macro and we’re set. It’s only three steps, so bare with me.

1. Save a keyword to you delicious bookmarklet

2. Record the VIM macro

• Find a website you like
• Record the macro
  • q to start recording
  • d will be the macro name
  • o to open a bookmark
  • delicous, because that was the keyword
  • [enter] to open the page
  • [esc] to leave insert mode
  • q to save the macro

3. Save your lovely page to Delicious

4. Done

The next time you want to save a page to delicious, just hit @d to automatically redo what you just did by hand.

Note that there’s no end in usability here – you can do that with your readability bookmarklet, you can post a page to your favorite news aggregator and so on and so forth.

This guide will use encfs, which uses business proof AES or Blowfish algorithms. Most importantly, it has a major benefit over other available encryption mechanisms – it operates on blocks. It doesn’t hide an entire encrypted volume in a single file. This approach doesn’t work well with Dropbox, because once the user changes only one file the whole Dropbox will be synchronized.

1. Install MacFuse.
2. Install encfs. If you have Homebrew, this is as easy as:
   

   $ sudo brew install encfs

3. Delete your files from Dropbox. After deleting them, make sure to go to the webapp, hit ‘Show Deleted Files’ and delete each file/folder permanently.
4. Now comes the fun part. Set up your encrypted Dropbox:
   

   $ encfs ~/DropboxEncrypted ~/Dropbox

   Enter ‘y’ to create the folder DropboxEncrypted, enter ‘p’ for Paranoia mode and chose a password.

5. You’re done. ~/Dropbox will show your files just fine, but when you take a look at them on the webapp, you will see them encrypted.

After a reboot, the userspace mount of ~/Dropbox will be lost. Repeat step 4 to mount it again. If you ever want to unmount yourself, just umount it. This process can be automated with encfsvault.

Linux users, don’t worry – I didn’t forget you. Switch MacFuse with fuse and encfsvault with pam-mount. You’re a Linux user, you will manage.

Update for Lion users:
Don’t use MacFuse, it’s obsolete. Just install fuse4x and fuse4x-kext, then encfs – all via homebrew.

During the last year, however, I came to realize that even though trac is a great tool for many projects, it might not be best for my personal projects. For one, social visibility is close to zero – in part because I like to host on my own server. Second, I was wrong to think svn is good enough for smaller projects – even when working alone git has major benefits. If only for being able to work offline, worry free distributed backups and beyond human speed. Anyway, “good enough” sometimes is just a fancy argument for being lazy.

So, last week I finally decided to get over it and to try github and git as my SCM toolset of choice. To use github is a no-brainer these days – just about every day I read great stories on HackerNews or reddit/r/programming. It’s not just about free hosting, that’s not a real problem anyway. It’s all about social visibility these days. Not having a github link on your CV will lead to certain questions.

Being on the wrong end of this discussion can be unnerving. It’s not that I can’t defend my point of view. It’s because everyone asking me about it has been right. After having worked with github/git the last couple of days, I conclude those tools have become mainstream for a good reason.

I’m a strong advocate of kaizen – to always improve yourself a little bit. I also encourage people to not only use the tools they know, but to always seek out for the best tool for a new job. I now have to realize, that concerning SCM it was me who had the outdated mindset. trac certainly is a great tool, I won’t deny that. But there is space for improvement. Time to move on.

Turns out, I’m a pretty active coder in my spare time. I worked on four projects the last few days, three of them visible on my new github account. Just smallish hacks, but hell – that’s what I love about coding: always being able to tackle new problems quickly and upfront; it is not about the big bucks – those are a side-effect. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/12/07/transition-to-githubgit-from-tracsvn/feed/ 1 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/12/07/some-gforge-automation/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/12/07/some-gforge-automation/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:06:25 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/12/07/some-gforge-automation/ There is no automated way of moving tracker items in GForge. Each item has to be moved by hand. I just wrote an iMacros script to automate this task, which has saved me and a friend a whole day of clicking repetitively.

You can find this script on github: https://github.com/preek/gforge-mass-move-tracker-items

Why we needed this: When you implement a new custom workflow in a legacy GForge environment, it is best to do so in a template. Every new project can then be cloned from it.

Unfortunately old projects will not get updated. You have two choices now: One is to repeat enforcing the workflow on every project (which is a tedious task and can easily take up to a day). The other is to make a new tracker which is cloned from the template. Then you can move your tracker items from the old tracker to the new one. Voila, you got the new workflow rules applied. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/12/07/some-gforge-automation/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/11/17/getting-rid-of-a-ubuntu-resource-hog/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/11/17/getting-rid-of-a-ubuntu-resource-hog/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:03:18 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/11/17/getting-rid-of-a-ubuntu-resource-hog/

While graphical package managers like Synaptic or KPackageKit certainly are great tools for the novice Ubuntu user, I personally don’t see any benefit against the various apt CLI bindings. For one, I’m not a big fan of using GUIs where not needed and secondly, the graphical package managers’ search features come with extra baggage – they use Xapian in a cron job for indexing, which can be quite a CPU hog.

Even though Ubuntu has good defaults and uses ionice to schedule for IO priority, this setup caused my system to hang completely. To be fair, I should mention that I run VirtualBox instances in parallel.

To disable the regular indexing, you can remove execute permission on the cron job:

sudo chmod 644 /etc/cron.weekly/apt-xapian-index

Or you can completely uninstall the tools:

sudo aptitude purge apt-xapian-index

You can also uninstall KPackageKit or Synaptic completely, but you would lose your update manager reminding you of new packages.

In GVIM, there is a little manual labour involved, because in Linux, the window manager is responsible for, well.. managing windows – GVIM itself can’t implement “fullscreen”.

To achieve true fullscreen capabilities in GVIM and Linux, there are two steps involved:

• Make a shortcut in your window manager for fullscreen
• Get rid of GVIMs’ menu and toolbar

I’ll demo #1 for KDE:

Get rid of the menu:

And the toolbar:

Of course, you could edit your vimrc and set those flags globally.

Now, enjoy your editing with SHIFT+ALT+F.

Well, this setup has its flaws. What if I wanted to listen to Grooveshark for example? I would be stuck with the internal speakers. But no longer so, Airfoil comes to the rescue. This application can hook into system audio and redirect everything to Airport Express. There is added benefit for the old setup, too. Using the volume toggles on the keyboard will have impact on iTunes, now.

Setting this up is dead simple – like four clicks. You’ll figure it out.

It seems like a great idea to generate modest revenue for content creators of all kind. So I gave it a try. My blog is usually not very high traffic, but there is a steady stream of 6-7k visitors to my old articles. Those articles generate a time on page between 6-10 minutes each. I like to think that people stay and enjoy the read. So I made myself an account and installed the official flattr plugin for WordPress.

10’000 unique visitors to my blog later, I received no single flattr.

By no means does my experiment imply any significant validity for the general public, but I see no reason to keep the advertising buttons on my blog, either.

Adobe has some documentation concerning start parameters for PDFs here and here.

Open via chapter name

Append the complete chapter name to your link URL.

Example: http://blog.dispatched.ch/sps/thesis.pdf#3.4%20Programmiersprache%20und%20Paradigmen

Note: Chapter names are to be encoded as is common practice in URLs. In this example blanks are encoded to %20.

Open a specific page

Append the attribute ‘page’ followed by the page number to your link URL.

Example: http://blog.dispatched.ch/sps/thesis.pdf#page=38

Since the project is in stealth mode right now, I can’t say which pages I am referring to, but let me give you these facts:

• ~170kb HTML code
• W3C validation shows about 1300 errors and 2600 warnings per page

Considering this many errors and warnings, I previously thought the job had to be done using BeautifulSoup, because it is known to have a very error resistant parser. In fact, BeautifulSoup doesn’t parse the HTML directly, but splits the tags in tag-soup by applying regular expressions around them. Opposing popular stories this seems to make BeautifulSoup very resilient towards bad code.

However, BeautifulSoup doesn’t perform well on the described files. The task: I need to parse 20 links of a particular class off the page. I put the relevant code in a seperate method and profiled it using cProfile:

cProfile.runctx("self.parse_with_beautifulsoup(html_data)", globals(), locals())
def parse_with_beautifulsoup(html_data):
  soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(html_data)
  links_res = soup.findAll("a", attrs={"class":"detailsViewLink"})
  links = [car_link["href"] for car_link in car_links_res]

Parsing 20 pages, this takes 167s on my small Debian VPS. Thats 8s+ per page. Incredibly long. Thinking of how BeautifulSoup parses, it’s understandable however. The overhead of creating tag-soup and parsing via RegExp leads to a whopping 302’000 method calls for just these four lines of code. I repeat: 302’000 method calls for four lines of code.

Hence, I tried lxml. The corresponding code is:

root = lxml.html.fromstring(html_data)
links_lxml_res = root.cssselect("a.detailsViewLink")
links_lxml = [link.get("href") for link in links_lxml_res]
links_lxml = list(set(links_lxml))

On the 20 pages, this takes only 2.4s. That’s only 0.12s per page. lxml needed only 180 method calls for the job. It runs 70x faster than BeautifulSoup and creates 1600x fewer calls.

When you do a graph of these numbers, the performance difference looks ridiculous. Well, let’s have some fun(;

lxml vs BeautifulSoup performance

Considering lxml supports xpath as well, I’m permanently switching my default HTML parsing library.

Note: Ian Bicking wrote a wonderful summary in 2008 on the performance of several Python HTML parsers which led me to lxml and to this article.

Update (08/17/2010): I planned on implementing my results on Google AppEngine. “Unfortunately” lxml relies heavily on C-code (that’s where the speed comes from^^). AppEngine is a pure Python environment. It will never run modules written in C.

There’s much joy to extract from this graph from WolframAlpha (note: WA uses data from 06/30/2010. The breakthrough was imminent back then):

Now, please don’t come bothering me, because Microsoft still has Windows and Office to receive the big routine paycheck while Apple has to constantly innovate to keep its pace. Depending on those two has thought Microsoft nothing but stagnation. In the meantime Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter arose. If Microsoft doesn’t change pace, they will suffer Yahoos’ fate.

If you ask me, it would be for the best of it. In the field of technology not the biggest player will win in the long run, but the most innovative. Do you remember those Kodak cameras that didn’t go digital (1990:7B, 2010:0$, source)? Geocities was hip once and worth 3.6B in 1999, now dead (source).

The list continues. Even when there is market domination, there still is room to manoeuvre. Microsoft didn’t equip the first personal computers – and they certainly won’t be the last.

I won’t elaborate on how to get an account, download the SDK and get started, because Google hosts great tutorials for these itself. If you are already familiar with Python web development this will get you started in a matter of minutes.

I personally chose not to use the Google webapp framework, because I’m quite familiar with CherryPy. I fell in love with it, because it feels very sleek – very Zen-like. This comes to no surprise, because it was a deliberate design decision as can be read in The Zen of CherryPy.

Getting started with CherryPy on GAE is no trouble, either. GAE supports any Python framework that is WSGI-compliant. Those include Django, CherryPy, web.py and Pylons. Google doesn’t host these frameworks themselves, so all you have to do is copy the whole framework into your GAE project to get the import to work. That’s it. Same counts for any 3rd party module. Need BeautifulSoup? Just copy the py-file to your project. Easy as cake.

Now, if you want to serve images dynamically, you don’t have to store them on harddisk to link to them. Just save them in the Google Datastore and serve whenever needed.

Using the following snippet you will be able to dynamically serve images with URLs like this:

http://application/handler_name/index/[0-9]*

import cherrypy
from cherrypy import expose
import wsgiref.handlers
import DynamicImage
class Root:
  @expose
  def index(self):
    return ""
class GetImage():
  """ GetImage provides a handler for dynamic images """
  def __init__(self):
    """
      Mockup for getting some images. Datastore or live
      scraping could be done here
    """
    # Note: DynamicImage is just a mockup.
    # There is no such module.
    dynamic_image = DynamicImage.DynamicImage()
    self.pictures = dynamic_image.getImages()
  @expose
  def index(self, num=None):
    """
      Provides the handler for urls:
        application/handler_name/index/[0-9]*
    """
    return self._convert_to_image(self.pictures[0][int(num)])
  def _convert_to_image(self, picture):
    cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Type'] = "image/jpg"
    return picture
# Root() doesn't do anything here. It normally serves your index page.
root = Root()
# Generate route http://app/img/
root.img = GetImage()
# Start CherryPy app in wsgi mode
app = cherrypy.tree.mount(root, "/")
wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(app)

One last note: Processes running longer than 15-30s will be cut off from GAE with the DeadlineExceededError exception. You can catch this exception and try to divide your workload into smaller pieces.

Many thanks to my great designer Katrin from http://rocketship.cc

Comments?

business_card_draft

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 2

Stop the construction of Europe’s biggest slaughterhouse
http://www.vebu.de/aktuelles/petitionen/465-aktionen-und-petitionen/?pet_id=582

This new slaughterhouse would run at 7.5 deaths per second. Seriously, do you people need even cheaper meat? At a discounter, a chicken already costs about 2€. There is absolutely no margin for a cruel free life or any decent quality in the “production process”. This is madness.

Stop a new animal testing lab in Malaysia
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/StopPlansForAnimalTestingMalaysia

We know how cruel animal testing is in Europe. How bad will it be in a lesser developed country with even fewer laws concerning animal rights? Besides, there’s lots of proof that animal testing is not only cruel, but completely unnecessary (read for example “Doctors speak out against animal testing”).

End the brutal killing of more than 20,000 dolphins every year in Japan
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/petitions/252

Japan is known for killing whales to study them. Afterwards they sell their meat on the market. The profits therein are of course completely unrelated to their will of studying so many whales. Due to international pressure, Japan begins to slaughter dolphins instead. 20’000 a year as a new documentary shows.

As human being and a vegetarian, probably it is not only my right, but also an obligation to make this world a better place. There is no god to do it for us. And mankind itself often is incompetent or incapable of action. I, on the other hand, have the needed time and resources to do my part. I honestly feel bad for not doing enough.

I want to finish with a small side story. Today, during my tea break, a smoker came up to me and asked me what I drank. I had peppermint tea, because I’m still suffering a little from the flew. His reaction was completely gross. He said “No wonder you’re ill. You should live more hardcore! Eat more sausage and stuff. This makes you strong.”

I will remind him later this year.  In Winter he will regularly go outside to have a smoke, coughing and freezing at -10C. He is a real hardcore guy. He eats sausage and stuff.

The pigs inside the cage are brought down in groups to a space full of CO2. Taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/igualdadanimal/3806411367/

Anyway, I normally don’t do any administration using web interfaces (such as Confixx, Plesk and the like), but I have come across Webmin, which is “a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more.”

Webmin supports user administration. Any account can implement the role of “Change Passwords”. Unfortunately, this will enable this particular user to change any other users password. Lucky for me, Webmin is OSS and written in Perl. So a quick four line code change does exactly what I need.

This is how the Munin front-end looks after the patch. If you’re not root, you can only change your own password. End of line.

If you want to recreate this setup on your machine, you can download the patch here and apply it with

$ patch /usr/share/webmin/passwd/index.cgi > index.patch

Have fun.

If you’re less lucky, you can also go to the author’s homepage, download and build it yourself. The package will feature the game itself, a dedicated server and a level-editor. Plenty of room for a great many gaming sessions!

overkill2

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 3

Notes:
1. There were more players, but I didn’t managage to get my glorifying screenshot soon enough.
2. Beware of server lag. I played it in a screen session on a Linux VPS. I got a load average of up to 19.48, 7.16, 3.00

Google for inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” -inurl -intitle and have fun controlling other peoples’ webcams.

Some webcam in Japan I presume

]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/hack-yourself-a-webcam/feed/ 1 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/sometimes-i-just-get-this-feeling/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/sometimes-i-just-get-this-feeling/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:54:54 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/19/sometimes-i-just-get-this-feeling/ As soon as an incompetent manager gets to have only one say during a project, hell seems to break loose and stuff just gets worse.

Finally, after many sessions of hardcore reverse engineering, I have concluded the algorithm used by senior management. Hereby, I share it with the world.

<pre>  def ask_manager(question="Can I dump Windows and use Linux?"):
  """
   Bend the universe to the magical logic of senior management
  """
  if True:
    globals()['True'], globals()['False'] = False, True
  if True:
   return "Do as requested."
  else:
   return "Do the opposite."
                        

He will be 76 in a few months, but that doesn’t slow him down. He owns a big screen Plasma and always carries his mobile phone. The only “weak spot” considering regular use of technology is computers. It has been over ten years now since he retired. Back in the day his company just started using computers for accounting. But well, what do you have secretaries for?(;

Anyway, the first computer he bought was a brand new Pentium II. Back in the day Win98 was considered state of the art and Linux was not made for n00bs. Understandingly, he never grew into it. Neither did I. But while I switched to Linux, he didn’t find any good use for his computer.

When I bought my first Apple Macbook in 2007, I installed his second machine (coincidentally my previous PC). It was an IBM dual PIII workstation/monster with lots of RAM. Before it changed owners, I operated it with 6 graphics cards and 6 HDDs. I also got my grandfather a modem, a printer and a fax. The workstation ran Ubuntu 2006/04 which was a decent improvement on Win98.

Even though Ubuntu already had a pretty good user interface, usage was still clunky. He had to go to the “computer room”, switch off the phone, switch on the modem, boot the PC, connect to the internet. He had to use peripherals he was absolutely not used to. I didn’t think it was this hard to use a mouse, but when you’re 70 and never had to use one, this device really can be a deal killer. Honestly, who invented the single left click, the double click and the right click methodology? When he kept asking me over and over when to do what, I realized how bad a design decision this really was.

Skip a few years ahead. We’re in June 2010 now. Apple reveals the iPad.

I decided pretty fast I had to get this device for my grandfather. I was sure he would love to use a computer for mail, news, his favorite croatian radio program (which is normally broadcasted via medium wave – in Germany there’s only reception at night), games and reading about cooking and gardening. There was just no way he would do it with a standard PC in the back of his house. But he would do it on his couch if what he wanted was only one click away. Besides, he always fancied my iPhone as a pretty cool device.

So I went to my local Apple Store and got on the priority list. A couple of weeks later I got mail saying I had 24h time to fetch it from the store. And so I did. I wanted him to have an Google account for mail and calendar, various bookmarks, apps and games preinstalled. Of course I bought the 3G version, so I got my hands on a data plan. The first three days I configured and tested the iPad in such a way that everything would just work out of the box.

Well, what can I say. The decision to get him an iPad has been an overwhelming success! He loves the device, tells me it’s so much easier to use and he keeps asking perfectly good questions on stuff I have not yet taught him. And when he get’s shown what to do, he will remember it and not ask the same question again.

Being the interested and always curious techie he is, he already wrote me mail, read some stuff online and played many winning sessions in Mahjong. I’m quite interested as to where this new love goes. We already upgraded and bought the iPad case – we also wanted the camera connection kit to match his Sony Cybershot, but it is out of stock in Zürich, Stuttgart and even online!

I’m happy he finally made the transition to being part-time online. And I guess he is, too.

Just my 2c on how useful the iPad can be.

Unpacking

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 3

This is how a waitress taught the three IT guys(me and two friends) during lunch break how to enjoy rich video content these days. Kinda crazy, I didn’t think that such a thing could completely elude me for such a long time.

Great surplus: Only downloading is considered legal in Switzerland.

Anyways, I will keep paying for my movies on iTunes for quality, convenience and a great service. movie2k, however, has proven to be a great source of many beloved contemporary series that, not being a US resident, I couldn’t watch legally otherwise.

So, thanks Ms. ? for this hint.

If only I had found a any dust to clean out, the work might have been worth the effort. In the two+ years of heavily working with the MB (also in potentially “dirty places” like couches, beds and cars [pun intended]), there was close to no dirt accumulation. Either that’s due to a really good design or I can easily start to mess my apartment a little more up.

Anyway, two screws will never find their way back into the MB. One is lost due to the bolt thread being fragged by unscrewing, the other I just forgot to put back to where it came from. Well, what good (or bad) can such a tiny screw do?

At least the MB hasn’t become louder in the process.

When I should be happy about escaping business for an hour or two while seeking harmony of body and soul, I wonder about some unfavorable thing I will have to do when finishing my run. I could think about work, having to have a long drive afterward, preparing exams, doing all kinds of crazy demanding stuff.

Instead I should focus on the moment. Sometimes there’s something really good going on even without me having made the choice of doing it. And if I made a choice, I should stick to it even more, quit moaning and enjoy the hell out of it.

This conclusion came to me on kilometer 9, on an uphill battle against my concentration of not going to stop just because there’s a hill in my way. Needless to say that the hill probably was the best part of the workout. My run today trained me well and I felt really good about it. And I’m humble of having had this particular pleasure.

Anyway, I wonder.. I believe I have known about this small, but prevalently important attitude. I should start meditating again, I miss it at any rate. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/07/doing-it-consciously/feed/ 0 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:51:31 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/ Let me start with: “I hate Windows from the bottom of my heart.”

But there’s another level of hate. I hate pseudo business proof settings in Windows even more. One of those would be the “Auto Lock”.

Anyway, if you think that your (clients) VPN – or bureau for that case – can keep up its security without the dreaded auto lock – here’s what you do:

1. Hate the auto lock

2. Right click your desktop

3. Chose screensaver

4. Uncheck “On resume, display logon screen”

5. Be

At least a little less unhappy. You’re still with Windows. You’re still doomed. But the apocalypse is a little farther away for now. ]]> http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/06/disable-windows-auto-desktop-lock/feed/ 5 http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/05/scaling-down-2/ http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/05/scaling-down-2/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:24:27 +0000 Alain M. Lafon http://blog.dispatched.ch/2010/07/05/scaling-down-2/

When I came to work at 9:25AM today, I was greeted by open doors – but not our hermetically sealed bureau was breached (at least not this time), but the equally secure ‘server’-farm.

Why do I mention the time? Because I was the first developer on the scene.

Sitting down on my desk the next failure was waiting for me – some of our systems apparently are having trouble. Maybe the fan is not up to speed. Who knows.

Bottom line: good thing I adapted my clothing to our working athmosphere, today. Pun intended.