Archive → July, 2009
ssh hanging
i’m sure everyone who has used ssh has experienced this, but couldn’t put their finger on what was happening exactly. this article explains.
cheetah == fortran
turns out the cheetah python templating engine (2.0 since year 2006) is quite reminiscent of fortran (since the 1950′s) in their use of the #slurp directive (cheetah) and the $ string. either one, when appended to the end of a string, remove the implicit newline which usually gets printed. it took me ages to figure out how to suppress newline printing back when i did someone’s fortran homework, now i’ve had to struggle with it all over again.
i’m not a language designer, but it never seemed like the best idea to me! but what do i know? i hope this saves someone an hour of searching.
[py]inotify, polling, gtk and gio
i have this software with a gtk mainloop, using dbus and all that fun stuff that seems to play together nicely. i know about the kernel inotify support, and i wanted it to get integrated with that above stack. i thought i was supposed to do it with pyinotify and io_add_watch, but on closer inspection into the pyinotify code it turns out that it seems to actually use polling! (search for: select.poll)
thinking i was confused, i emailed a friend to see if he could confirm my suspicions. we both weren’t 100% sure, a little searching later i was convinced when i found this blog posting. i’m surprised i didn’t find out about this sooner. in any case, my application seems to be happy now.
as a random side effect, it seems that when a file is written, i still see the G_FILE_MONITOR_EVENT_ATTRIBUTE_CHANGED *after* the G_FILE_MONITOR_EVENT_CHANGES_DONE_HINT event, which i would have expected to always come last. maybe this is a bug, or maybe this is something magical that $EDITOR is doing- in any case it doesn’t affect me, i just wasn’t sure if it was a bug or not. to make it harder, different editors save the file in different ways. gedit seems to first delete the file, and then create it again– or at least from what i see in the gio debug.
the code i’m using to test all this is:
#!/usr/bin/python
import gtk
import gio
count = 0
def file_changed(monitor, file, unknown, event):
global count
print 'debug: %d' % count
count = count + 1
print 'm: %s' % monitor
print 'f: %s' % file
print 'u: %s' % unknown
print 'e: %s' % event
if event == gio.FILE_MONITOR_EVENT_CHANGES_DONE_HINT:
print "file finished changing"
print '#'*79
print 'n'
myfile = gio.File('/tmp/gio')
monitor = myfile.monitor_file()
monitor.connect("changed", file_changed)
gtk.main()
(very similar to the aforementioned blog post)
and if you want to see how i’m using it in the particular app, the latest version of evanescent is now available. (look inside of evanescent-client.py)
evanescent 0.3
new evanescent released. get your tar balls today. now with pro dbus support, and happier than 0.2 in every way. please send in any patches and bug reports.
ps: easy one line installation too!
