Today I spent the day completely breaking down and replacing the entire above-ground portion of my in-ground pool’s plumbing. I had some problems crop up with my multi-port valve, and I had to take a few things apart to troubleshoot and remove the pump as the source of a pressure problem (namely, there wasn’t any)….
Category: Technology
Two ssh-isms I forgot today
1. To remove an offending known_hosts key without opening the file or using sed or whatever, you can just run ssh-keygen -R <hostname>, which will remove any and all keys for the given hostname (see man ssh-keygen for other options like this). 2. To copy files from a local directory with spaces in its name…
UNIX mtime vs. ctime
Sometimes I get questions from people about stuff that I’ve long since taken for granted. One is “what’s the difference between mtime and ctime?” The answer is simple, but I wanted to post it here in case it can help anyone. In UNIX: mtime is “modification time”, and it is the time at which the…
New Job!
I started a new job about 6 weeks ago. I’m now doing infrastructure architecture at http://gfdl.noaa.gov GFDL stands for Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. It’s a NOAA site that supports atmospheric and climatology research. So in other words, the work I do supports research into things ranging from global warming to what the atmosphere on Mars…
Catching up, Part 2: Python Magazine Update
So, it’s been 1 month since we officially announced Python Magazine’s existence. I’m very happy (and even more relieved) to report that things are going wonderfully so far. In these early days prior to the actual release of the first issue, the focus is primarily on content development. This is also called “getting articles in…
Catching up, Part 1: New Job!
Ok, I have lots of blogging to do now. I haven’t blogged in at least a week, and plenty is happening. First, I have a new job. For those who didn’t know, for the past 6 years I was working for the Computer Science Dept. at Princeton University. I’ve moved over to work in an…
Looking for the Twitter Kool-aid
So, *another* person asked if I’m “on twitter”, so I went and got on there. Whatever. As far as I can see, it’s a useless distraction, but people seem to be obsessed with it. I’m convinced that these people don’t have any real work to do. Once you sign up, the only thing you can…
Where does that Python DB handle go?
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long. My solution works, but there’s a better way. Create the connection in main(), and create separate *cursors* for each Host. Cursors are cheap, and you reuse the connection. Thanks to Brend on #python (irc.freenode.net) for the enlightenment. Python has been a wonderful language to get to know so far….
Why you should write: common myths debunked
I give a talk that advocates writing. I do this because I owe my career to people who wrote down what they knew and made it available in one form or another; either free on a web site, or in a book that I bought. When I started editing, one of my jobs was to…
Python 2.5’s “partition” saves my bacon
So I was on more than one IRC channel today asking a question that I got lots of answers to, all of which looked really messy to me, so I dug into the documentation and found that in Python 2.5, strings have a new method, called “partition”. Here’s the trouble I had, and why “partition”…