Second p0sttech notes and web hackery from the guy that brought you bzero, python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review and the internet topic exchangePython Community Server archive back online- June 23, 2008 I used to run a little blog community with some software I wrote back in 2002 called Python Community Server. I took it off the air in 2005 or 2006 or so (I don't remember exactly) after it became overrun by comment spam and the database load started to bring down the somewhat underpowered server it was running on. I just got around to bringing the archive back online. It's not running the original software any more so all comments are inaccessible, but the blog content is back... so there...http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/23/#200806231 git-svn: fun with branches and cherry-pick- June 17, 2008 More on git-svn: I'm getting the hang of using branches and rebasecherry-pick to stage stuff before checking it in to a shared repository. This is for the situation where you're working on something and committing locally, and partway through you find and fix a bug or implement something that others care about. You want to check it in to the shared repository, but keep the rest of your stuff out of the way. The trick here is to work on a branch (say work), and use git cherry-pick to copy...http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/18/#200806181 With greylisting, my inbox is useful again- June 11, 2008 Wow - that was impressive. Since installing postgrey, I'm down to about 5 spam messages in my inbox per day. My inbox is useful again! Commenthttp://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/12/#200806121 Aggregating notifications- June 9, 2008 A good proportion of my e-mail these days has to do with the status of applications running on various servers around the place. Various Rails apps e-mail me every time an exception is thrown, and various Nagios installs e-mail me alerts. It's getting to the point where my mailbox is pretty cluttered, and it doesn't mean anything any more when Thunderbird pings me to say I have new mail -- it could be a critical alert telling me a site is down, but then again it might just be some spam, or a.http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/10/#200806101 Discovery: you can break out of a set of RewriteRules- June 9, 2008 I'm not sure if this is a new thing in Apache 2.0, or if it's been there all along, as I've never seen anyone use this technique, and I've been looking for something like it for years. Normally mod_rewrite runs through the set of rules, and if none of them match, it passes the URI on to Apache. If any of them match, it applies the changes, then runs through the rules again. It keeps going until it runs through the rules without any matches. This is often exactly not what you want. For...http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/9/#200806091 git-svn- June 5, 2008 I'm getting to the point where I'm using git-svn in preference to the plain Subversion client for every project I actively work on. I don't use most of the features, but it's worth it just to be able to do git log, git svn log or git log -u and see the commit log without needing to ask the server. Remember how awesome it was the first time you ran svn status or svn diff and got immediate results, as opposed to cvs update or cvs diff -u This is the natural next step from there. Being able...http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/5/#200806051 Hacking Pidgin to only flash the tray icon when your nick is mentioned in a chat- June 3, 2008 Pidgin is awesome - it's a cross-platform IM client (I'm running it on Windows) for pretty much every IM network except Skype. One thing I've wanted to change for a while is the 'blink window on received message' function; many of my coworkers are using Adium or iChat or some other OS X app that only tries to grab your attention if (a) you receive a personal IM, or (b) your username is mentioned in a chat. Here are some notes about the process, to refresh my memory if I come back to this in a.http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/4/#200806041 Sneaky tricks with NUL characters in Windows Registry keys- June 3, 2008 Something interesting I found out yesterday. Various bits of software create keys in the Windows Registry with embedded NUL characters to hide information about themselves or make themselves difficult to delete. If you try to view or delete these keys using regedit.exe or regedt32.exe, or using the Win32 Registry API (RegOpenKey etc), it'll fail, as the Win32 API uses null-terminated strings. However, NT (thus 2000XPVista) has a mostly-undocumented "native API" that uses length-based rather..http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/2008/6/3/#200806031 |