Advogato blog for asmodai

Small touches that inspire

Sat, 14 May 2011 21:15:55 GMT

It’s the littlest of things that can really brighten my mood when I notice them. In this case I was watching Fallout: New Vegas’ DLC trailer for Honest Hearts. In the trailer you see the player with a pistol and on one side of the pistol at least is written: “καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν”. This is Greek and refers to the second part of the verse of John 1:5 in the New Testament of the bible, meaning in English: “and the darkness did not comprehend it”. In my opinion a great way to bring enlightenment by the bullet.

TortoiseSVN (Subversion) and Windows 7 file corruption

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:16:51 GMT

During a checkout of a Subversion tree on my Windows 7 installation I got quite a fair share of errors from TortoiseSVN, all of which ended with The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

After digging around a bit, I came across this blog post on the exact same problem. And subsequently I found there is a hotfix available from Microsoft on their page about . This hotfix will be in the upcoming service pack 1.

You might also be able to work around it by disabling indexing on the particular folder or drive. It solved it for me at least.

Visual Studio editor rulers

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:16:44 GMT

If you like to have a visual cue for, say, where the 80th column is then this page over at Stack Overflow details the various registry keys you might need to add as well as showing which extensions can do it for you. For VS 2010 Professional and up you can use the Productivity Power Tools, but it seems that Visual Studio 2010 Express has no guides support.

Sublime Text with 80 and 120 column rulers

Wed, 2 Feb 2011 12:12:18 GMT

For many programming languages we still like to use either 80 or 120 columns in our editors to ensure it fits easily on print, as well as to use it as an aid for ensuring concise code.

In Sublime Text you can set vertical rulers for this by going to Preferences > User File Preferences and add rulers 80 120 and save the file.

For Sublime Text 2 it’s again under Preferences > User File Preferences, but the configuration file is now in JSON format, so you need to add "rulers": [80, 120] and maybe you need to append a comma at the end if you have more configuration directives following it.

PyCharm 1.1.1 released

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:15:59 GMT

PyCharm 1.1.1 was released yesterday. It consists mostly of bugfixes, find the full release notes on their site.

Mercurial 1.7, cacerts, and FreeBSD

Fri, 7 Jan 2011 14:15:05 GMT

So with recent Mercurial 1.7 releases HTTPS support was tightened, so you are bound to encounter a warning in the form of: warning: bitbucket.org certificate not verified (check web.cacerts config setting).

Now, on http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CACertificates there are details on what to configure for certain operating systems. Given I use FreeBSD, I altered my $HOME/.hgrc as follows:

[web]
cacerts = /etc/ssl/cert.pem

For OpenBSD this should be in the same place since release 3.8. But apparently NetBSD does not have such a file in base.

PyCharm and external lint tools

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:15:46 GMT

PyCharm already has a number of features present in various tools to lint/check your source code with, but offers a way to hook up external tools. Under File > Settings is a section called IDE Settings. One of the headings here is called External Tools. Select this heading and then press the Add... button on the right hand pane to configure a new external tool.

In the Edit Tool window that now appeared fill in a name, e.g. PEP8 and a group name Lint and add a description. Next point the Program to the location of the pep8.exe executable, e.g. C:\Python27\Scripts\pep8.exe. For Parameters you need to use $FilePath and Working directory should be filled in by default. Once done, you can close it by pressing the OK button.

Now, pyflakes has no .exe or .bat file to accompany it. You will need to add a pyflakes.bat in your Scripts directory inside Python with the following contents:

@echo off
rem Use python to execute the python script having the same name as this batch
rem file, but without any extension, located in the same directory as this
rem batch file
python "%~dpn0" %*

Within PyCharm you follow largely the same settings as for pep8, however make sure to point to the batch file of pyflakes under Program. Close the external tools configuration windows by clicking OK twice. Under the menu heading Tools you should see an submenu heading Lint which, in turn, should contain two menu items: PEP8 and Pyflakes.

Now open a Python file, go to Tools > Lint > PEP8 and you should get output like the following in your Run (4) window:

D:\Python26\Scripts\pep8.exe D:\pprojects\babel\babel\tests\__init__.py
D:\pprojects\babel\babel\tests\__init__.py:16:1: E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1

Process finished with exit code 1

svn switch in Mercurial (hg)

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:12:17 GMT

For my own sanity:

In order to change the parent repository URL of a Mercurial clone (as svn switch does) one simply edits .hg/hgrc and adjusts the default under [paths].

PyCharm 1.0

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:22:46 GMT

So I was so impressed by PyCharm that I purchased a license. I haven’t noticed much of any delays or slowdowns that other people have complained about.

On the topic of sensible date and temperature defaults in applications and websites

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:12:53 GMT

Something that can always get me a bit frustrated is the choice of defaults used in applications.

Dates: Aside from Belize, Canada, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Philippines, and the United States are the only countries using a date format where the month is the first entry, followed by day, and lastly year (mm/dd/yyyy). To put to numbers that’s about 436 million people who use this versus 6.35 billion that don’t (ratio of about 14:1). Of that 6.35 billion about 3.8 billion use a date format where day is first, followed by month, and lastly year (dd/mm/yyyy — ratio of about 9:1 to the month first users). About 1.81 billion use a form where the year is first, followed by month, and lastly day (yyyy/mm/dd, roughly equivalent to ISO 8601 — ratio of about 4:1 to the month first users). (Note: these 1.81 billion have a slight overlap with the 3.8 billion due to some countries having two date formatting forms in use or due to two or more distinct scripts with different date formatting styles.) So using a format where the month is first is only confusing for the majority of the world’s population. If you need a default date, use the ISO 8601 format — not only is it less ambiguous, it also allows for much better chronological sorting.

Temperature: Aside from Belize and the United States (I so far managed to find), the worldwide standard for temperature is Celcius, not Fahrenheit. If you are using Fahrenheit you are putting 6.48 billion people at a disadvantage solely against something like 313 million people. That’s a ratio of about 22:1, meaning you put 22 people at a disadvantage for every one person you are trying to please.

Disclaimer: do note that this of course only makes sense if you are appealing to an international audience. If you are just targetting a specific country you will of course default to what they use. On the other hand, properly fixing your code to be i18n-ready is the way to go anyway.