Nick Bastin

My frustration with the performance of SMB is really starting to push me over the edge (oh, so that’s what’s doing it, you say?). SMB, sadly, appears to be the only widely available and supported network filesystem left. You might argue that NFS is still relevant, but it really isn’t – even on [...]

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I have submitted a proposal for a talk on micro-optimization for PyOhio, and you should check out the CFP yourself (ok, probably not you, mom…). I had to write a little bio and I put a link to this blog in it, so I figured I’d make sure I still had the login information [...]

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It turns out this issue had already been reported, at:
http://bugs.python.org/issue4366

The initial (unaccepted) patch in there did the same thing I did in my source tree to make it work, but it was clearly the wrong thing (it had the “wrong thing” smell from the start, really). After a bunch of digging, the reality is [...]

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I generally abhor wasted space on web pages, but some situations are less of a problem than others. As with all things, you should consider your audience. For example, if you’re the Mozilla wiki, you probably ought to consider that your users are likely reading your pages while trying to do something else [...]

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Children, when writing Python code, remember, bare except clauses are bad. BAD.

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I know I haven’t written in a while. I might start again. I might not. I’m really unreliable like that.
However, I would like to take this moment to state that I really, really, hate Trac. Possibly I hate how people deploy it, but the common deployment for the wiki is quite [...]

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I’ve been poking around using dtrace on OS X (Snow Leopard) recently and have some interest in using it with Python. Apple provides probes in Python (although they have yet to make it upstream, for reasons that I can’t fathom, given that they’ve been available for years) but I’m having some issues with them.
There [...]

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Sadly I have the flu, so I haven’t been able to go to PyOhio. Word on the mailing list is that things are going well, and I’m disappointed that I’m not there sprinting, speaking, and generally hanging out with other fun python developers, but infecting other people is regarded as bad form.. :-/
I’ve spent [...]

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In the process of unrolling some recursive algorithms to be iterative, I’ve started using collections.deque, and I’ve decided it’s my new favorite general-purpose python data structure. This wasn’t a hard decision – lists are the general utility collection type and they suck, so really anything ordered and mutable was probably going to be better [...]

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Every once in a while gmail seems to forget to execute the “Skip the Inbox” step of my filters. This is almost certainly guaranteed to happen to a few messages every week (they get labelled, but not archived), but tonight it happened to about 100 messages and flooded my inbox, a real treat. [...]

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