Opinion

Changes that caught my eye in Python 3.2

Samat Jain — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:30:03 +0000

Python 3.2 was released a few days ago. Reading the What’s New document, some of the stuff that caught my eye…

argparse is a new command-line option parsing module that replaces optparse. I found optparse, now deprecated, a pain to use—argparse looks a lot better. argparse can be used in older programs today with a third-party module (E.g. argparse Debian package). I actively avoided adding command-line parsing to my applications because optparse was such a pain—something now much less of a problem.

The new concurrent.futures module seems to be a port of Java’s java.util.concurrent package. I haven’t looked into it yet, but with the GIL, how many people really care about Python threads? The simple examples given can easily be done with Python’s multiprocessing module, for both processes and threads, though without the Java paradigm. The threading module also has a new threading.Barrier class.

WSGI for Python 3 appears to be finalized. I’m looking forward to finally porting my WSGI web applications to Python 3. The email module also received the same makeover that WSGI needed for Python 3.

ElementTree has been updated to v1.3. Not that I care—lxml’s namespace handling is much better (which is to say, it’s just terrible as opposed to near unusable, as is with pure ElementTree).

Quite possibly the most badass addition to Python 3.2: the functools.lru_cache decorator. I use this pattern all the time, but have never gotten around to making it a generic class or decorator I could reuse across applications. With Python 3.2, I no longer need to. The idea: decorate a slow-performing function (where it makes sense) with functools.lru_cache, and Python will instantly and easily memoize the return values of that function making subsequent calls to the function faster.

html.escape() is a simple function that escapes HTML markup for you with the appropriate HTML/XML entities (I forget how I used to do this usually; something in one of the CGI utils, I think? Or maybe stuff in my template engine…).

This is just from a quick reading of the release notes—it’s very likely I missed something. What’d I miss? And what do you like that’s new in Python 3.2?

Topic:

Programming

Python

Deciphering Intel's new X25-M G2 SSD

Samat Jain — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:52:31 +0000

My laptop hard disk is beginning to die. In what seems like perfect timing, Intel has released a refresh of their X25-M solid state disk (SSD) lineup (via Engadget and Ars Technica). The new models offer much over the old ones:

Manufactured on a 35 nm vs 50 nm process
Faster seek times, both read and write, leading to more I/O operations per second (IOPS)
Significantly less expensive (Cited as a 60% price drop, though that’s comparing at-introduction MSRPs. It’s still at least 25% less.)
Greater shock tolerance (1500 G vs 1000 G)
Future TRIM command support, via firmware upgrade. The ATA TRIM command mitigates SSD fragmentation problems that have been the cause of many performance issues.

While die shrinks usually lead to parts that consume less power, the new X25-M uses the same amount of power when active (150 mW), and actually more power when idle (75 mW vs 60 mW). Still, it’s significantly less power than most laptop hard disk drives (my Hitachi 7K200 idles at 800 mW). [Source: Intel’s technical specifications]

Of course, with all these changes, Intel decided to name the drives the same as the old ones, making it difficult for people who want to buy one right now to know what device they’re actually getting.

This kind of inane marketing isn’t new, with the most infamous example on my mind being the Linksys WRT54G. Linksys (so far) as made 6 different revisions of the exact same model, drastically changing the internal hardware throughout the revisions. While most people don’t care, a few did, such as those in the modder community (like myself) who wanted to run modified firmwares. Purchasing anything took a lot of research on the part of the buyer. Manufacturers really should be in the business of making their products easier to buy, not more difficult.

Fortunately, I’ve done the research for you: the new Intel SSDs do have slightly different part numbers, so you can tell the old parts from the new. For example, the old X25-M 80 GB disk has a part number of SSDSA2MH080G1C1, while the newer model has a part number of SSDSA2MH080G201. That is, the part numbers contain either a “G1” or a “G2” corresponding to the revision.

With the glowing positive reviews for the X25-M since it’s introduction a few months ago, its new lower price, and most importantly, the failure of my current laptop disk, I’m going to pick up one of these drives within a week.

Topic:

Corporations

Computer Hardware

Marketing

Amarok 2 uses MySQL embedded as a metadata store

Samat Jain — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:16:25 +0000

There’s been a bit of turmoil in the Amarok and KDE communities the past week with Amarok’s decision to only support MySQL Embedded in Amarok 2. Jeff Mitchell has written about the Amarok design decisions made.

I’m a little bothered by this, as it forgeos all the “semantic desktop” work that has gone into KDE 4, namely what’s provided by the Strigi and Nepomuk libraries. One thing the whole semantic desktop concept entails is that other applications will be able use data another application stored, but without care to what that other application was or how it was stored. For example, I should be able to share the list of all tracks in my music library, how many times I’ve played tracks, what tracks I think are my favorite, etc across music players. This kind of abstraction is, obviously, good for users, but bad for developers of proprietary software. They don’t want you to easily switch between applications that they do not control. Amarok switching to it’s own database store is a stab at this kind of desktop interoperability. I’ve my own thoughts to add, though, that support what the developers are doing…

Amarok is an awesome application. Dare I say, it’s a killer application on Linux—on several occasions this past year I’ve recommended people install Linux just so that they could play with Amarok and see how much better it is compared to what they were using (yes, I’m looking at you, iTunes).

Before Amarok, I used Music Player Daemon (mpd). I stopped using it after a while: the playlist management wasn’t very good; it would eat those playlists that I spent a lot of effort to make; the GUIs available at the time were lacking; and it was very slow when working with tens of thousands of songs. Some of this may have changed but I’ve not been motivated to look back.

Enter Amarok: I switched because the playlist management was so much better. I setup a MySQL server on my workstation to store metadata, as SQLite was much too slow. Amarok backed with MySQL is very fast—I dare others to find a library-based music manager that is faster with the number of songs I’ve thrown at it.

Balancing desktop interoperability with performance is a delicate balancing act. Interoperability is the hot thing these days—look at how Apple’s line of integrated software and hardware continue to sip market share from the Microsoft-powered desktop. But when it comes down to it, performance and other more perceived benefits are going to win out over desktop interoperability. The Amarok developers’ decision to go with MySQL embedded is a good one that will hopefully keep people moving to Amarok over proprietary alternatives.

Topic:

Linux

Software

KDE

jQuery: the new defacto Javascript web framework

Samat Jain — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:38:47 +0000

News from a couple days ago: both Microsoft and Nokia are now including the jQuery Javascript framework as part of their development kits. That is: jQuery will be part of Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX framework and be available for use in applications written for ASP.NET; and jQuery will also be distributed on millions of Nokia phones.

Defacto standards, I believe, are a good way to inform the development of real standards. Standards developed the other way around, at least in the tech industry, have had a habit of taking a very long time to reach end consumers… for example, how many decades has it taken for your average web user to gain access to a fully CSS2-compliant web browser? How many more decades will it take for OASIS’s OpenDocument format to supplant Microsoft Word and its *.doc files?

Hopefully, this is the beginning of a path that will lead to jQuery’s inclusion into the Javascript language, as well as initiatives that will improve jQuery’s performance.

I like the fact that Microsoft and Nokia are not trying to reinvent the wheel, and roll their own Javascript frameworks. Sun did this with Java Server Faces. A frequent lament with JSF is that it’s nearly impossible to customize any of the widgets. There is too much complex, custom Javascript, and the adoption of the frameworks used makes figuring out how to work with them difficult.

Also, as others have noted, this is the first time Microsoft itself is distributing an open-source project with one of their products. A sign of things to come?

Topic:

Has the war on spam been lost?

Samat Jain — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:34:23 +0000

O’Reilly Radar has an article written by Dale Dougherty, a roundtable set of opinions on whether the war on spam can be won. Rafe Colburn also has his own response.

Rafe’s solution is to use GMail. In the Dougherty’s article, Paul Vixie mentions that the internet is going to become a “walled garden;” relying on proprietary technology provided from a single company is the same thing in my eyes. There’s no way I’m going to advocate a proprietary solution for something as important as my e-mail.

Eric Allman mentions DKIM, which I think is an excellent weapon in the war on spam. I’m not using it however, as it doesn’t fit in with the way I use e-mail, and MUA (e-mail client) and MTA (e-mail SMTP server, essentially) is extremely sparse.

My unfortunately ineffective and impractical solution to this problem is use of PGP. Besides identity verification via digital signatures, it is also a generic platform for encrypted digital communication, and provides a distributed, robust trust model. Unfortunately, its learning curve is high, and that is why it’s basically been a failure for the past 10 yrs.

Though, lack of user education is why the spam problem keeps getting worse too. It’s users who click links in spam e-mail; it’s users who allow spammers to take over their machines through their negligence in applying security updates; it’s users (sometimes) who allow their identities to be stolen.

Topic:

Politics

Software

The GNOME font dialog, why?

Samat Jain — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 02:23:55 +0000

Fredico M Quintero pointed out some serious flaws in GNOME’s font configuration dialog; the Novell Product Design wiki also describes some problems. In a sentence that fits in with what I believe is GNOME’s “simplicity mantra”, GNOME should just get rid of its useless, confusing fonts configuration dialog.

Why does it have a font configuration dialog anyway? Well, unfortunately, GNOME’s setting daemon completely ignores several fontconfig settings and instead uses its own settings for things like antialiasing type, whether hinting is used, DPI, etc. You need the font configuration dialog to change these settings, or you have to dig through gconf. Most of this was put in place probably to subvert a broken X setup; instead of implementing these hack-ish workarounds GNOME should instead push to fix X instead.

It’s extremely difficult to discern the difference between the different types of antialiasing. GNOME’s dialog doesn’t let you select arbitrary text, or let you render text in-place so that you can quickly compare between different antialiasing styles and subpixel orderings. These settings, along with DPI, are unlike the rest of the settings in the font configuration dialog because they don’t apply immediately. They only affect newly started applications, and the dialog does nothing to alert you of this.

Do users really need to be able to select subpixel ordering from a dialog? There are very few LCD monitors that do not use an RGB subpixel ordering. The very few people who rotate their LCD monitors into portrait mode (including me, see my past article Misery with online reading of PDFs and the need for portrait monitors) would use VRGB. Why not just set RGB subpixel ordering if the user is using an LCD? VRGB if their display is rotated? Again, these are things GNOME could discover by querying X…

Lastly, do users need to change the fonts used by their UI in the first place? The majority of Windows and MacOS X users don’t deviate from the defaults at all—why would GNOME users be given a choice through this confusing dialog? GNOME instead should use the fontconfig aliases “Sans”, “Sans Serif”, and “Monospace” rather than letting users choose fonts. A fresh GNOME setup already uses these aliases as the defaults anyway.

Of the settings in the font configuration dialog users may actually want to set, whether to use antialiasing or not is the only one that sticks out to me as needing an option. I think that the dialog could be replaced with a simple, descriptive checkbox somewhere that read “Antialias text” that would toggle all the heuristics I’ve described above.

Topic:

Linux

Usability

GNOME

India's rejection of the OLPC $100 laptop

Samat Jain — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 05:59:35 +0000

India’s Ministry of Education has said that India will not take part in the $100 laptop project [The Register]. Quoting the news article:

Education dismissed the laptop as “pedagogically suspect”. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”

The Playground, as well as many Internet commentators, think this is “fair reasoning.” I don’t see how–who ever said the laptop would replace teachers or classrooms? How exactly would they do that–is this supposed to make any sense?

Yes, the $100 laptop is a “fancy tool.” It is a fancy tool to facilitate a new age of electronic learning. Funds used to purchase these laptops should not be taken away from providing facilities and teachers, but instead on school supplies such as paper, pencils, and textbooks which themselves are generally expensive.

While India and much of the developing world may need more teachers and classrooms, yes, it’s a completely different problem that the $100 laptop isn’t meant to address. I’m waiting to see if there is valid criticism from India’s government in the future.

Topic:

Politics

OLPC

Lenovo to discontinue Linux support for Thinkpads

Samat Jain — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 04:20:02 +0000

Lenovo, the company that bought IBM’s personal computer division, including the Thinkpad brand, has decided to no longer support Linux on their computer products.

I do not see how the customer benefits from this, because Lenovo is effectively offering its customers less choice. Supporting Linux tends to not cost anything up front and instead affects design decisions, decisions that lead to a better, more high-quality product. It is not as if much was spent on marketing Linux offerings, either.

This move is probably to appease Microsoft, who almost surely offers Lenovo discount Windows licenses for shunning Linux. This will improve Lenovo’s bottom line, but will not give the consumer any more quality, any more service or support, and probably no change in price.

Of course, not supporting Linux has never stopped people from trying to run it anyway. But, think of it as a sign of things to come. No longer having any inclination to support Linux means that in the future they can go with completely proprietary components. Proprietary components that won’t work in Linux, and are almost universally more unstable and buggy, on Windows and Linux, than their non-proprietary counterparts.

So, I’m calling this the beginning of the end of the ThinkPad’s legendary quality. Smart move Lenovo.

Topic:

Linux

Corporations

ThinkPad

Distributing sources with modern Linux distributions

Samat Jain — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 10:27:34 +0000

Playing around with Ubuntu 6.06, I noticed that in the Software Preferences, that part of the default “Channels” (which are in actuality lines in /etc/apt/sources.list) include those for the Ubuntu’s packages’ sources.

I’m not sure why these are there by default… How many users actually need to recompile a package when the distribution came with a binary one? In my 5 yrs of using Linux, I’ve never needed to. Yes, I understand the whole free software and GPL thing, where sources must be available with software. This doesn’t mean that new users (a large part of Ubuntu’s user base) need to waste bandwidth and disk space on things they will hopefully never need to use.

I don’t see the practical use for distributing sources with a distribution. If you do need to compile something to get an install up and running, you may need the source for one single piece of software, and you won’t be going to the sources included with the distribution–after all, if their original binary package didn’t help, what use is re-creating a binary for the same version? You’ll be getting the latest version off the Internet and using that. It probably won’t even be by the makers of the distribution, but upstream somewhere. E.g. ditching a vendor kernel for one from kernel.org.

With Ubuntu, I can’t really complain much, as one only ends up downloading some relatively small text files. Back in the days when I used Redhat it was a different story: I’d spend a month downloading the latest Redhat ISO image, half of which was source RPMs that as a Linux newbie I had no use for.

Topic:

Linux

CentOS

Ubuntu

monoprice.com vs Dell OEM DVI cable--the thick vs the thin

Samat Jain — Sat, 06 May 2006 23:25:47 +0000

The latest rearrangement of my desk has had one goal: to get my CPU tower FAR away from me, so the noise does not drive me crazy. Doing this, however, has left my 6-foot DVI cables a little short.

I did not feel like paying a lot, and after hearing good reviews, I went and bought a few monoprice.com’s 10 ft premium 24-AWG DVI cables.

These things are thick. As you can see in the photo, at least three times thicker than a Dell OEM cable. The picture is not really to scale, and because the monoprice.com cable was new and so thick, I could not get it to lie flat.

Seriously, if you could strangle someone with the Dell DVI cable, you could just use the weight and stiffness of the monoprice.com cable to beat someone to death.

I’m not sure if I can draw much from this, though: the new cables are what are known as “dual-link” DVI cables, and the old ones were “single-link.” Dual link cables essentially have twice the number of wires, and are used to provide a digital signal to high-resolution displays such as the Dell 3007FPW and the 30” Apple Cinema Display. Also, for all their thickness, the picture does not really look any different.

But they work, and they were pretty cheap. I’m glad I didn’t go down to CompUSA or Best Buy and end up paying too much…

I bought two cables, and am using them to hook up my dual Dell 2405FPW displays to my machine. They work great so far.

Topic:

Computer Hardware

Google sues Microsoft over default search engine in Internet Explorer 7

Samat Jain — Thu, 04 May 2006 05:17:31 +0000

Google sues Microsoft. Google claims that Microsoft is a monopoly, and by setting the default search engine in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 to Microsoft-owned MSN Search, they are abusing their power as a monopoly.

I do not see Google making a good case here… MSN Search is a Microsoft product, as is Internet Explorer 7 and Windows. Microsoft has the right to promote its own products, and so far there is no evidence that Microsoft prevents or impairs use of Google or any other search engine.

Microsoft does not appear to care that Google is the default search engine for America Online’s client software, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari. It can be difficult to add MSN Search to these browsers as well: in Firefox, it took as many as 6-clicks and skimming through several pages to add MSN Search (it is now down to 2 clicks, with more simple pages).

Before you compare this to the Netscape versus Microsoft antitrust lawsuit back in the 1990s, understand it is a bit different. The case did not get traction till the issue of Internet Explorer using secret Windows APIs came up. Microsoft could use these secret APIs to make its browser faster; since they were secret no other 3rd party would be able to use them. It gives the Microsoft product a distinct, unfair advantage: it’s an abuse of power as a monopoly.

So far, there is no evidence of Microsoft doing anything like this in Google’s lawsuit.

I think it’s pretty clear Microsoft and Google are at war. And because everyone and their grandmother uses Windows, Microsoft will win. Of course, this will change if Google decides to introduce their own operating system, and can market it well enough so that a significant amount of people switch to it. Things are going to get interesting…

Topic:

Corporations

Microsoft

Python 2.5 alpha released

Samat Jain — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Python 2.5’s first alpha has been released. From a quick look at the What’s New in Python 2.5 document, what I thought was interesting…

Topic:

Programming

Python

New TV show: Rome

Samat Jain — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 05:04:00 +0000

HBO has a new TV show: Rome. It’s about… Rome. Particularly, the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman empire. Episode 2 aired this week, and I’m so far liking how they’re not improvising Roman history to make for good TV. Well, OK, they are.

It’s typical HBO. There’s totally uncensored sex. Not enough violence in my opinion (so far anyway). And totally superb acting. The show keeps historical context, at least as well as I know it, as a clear focus.

Though, it’s only the end of episode 2, and Caesar is already marching on Rome. This looks like it’s going to be a short series…

Topic:

Entertainment

Television

My take on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Samat Jain — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:32:00 +0000

I finished Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC this past week. Overall, I liked it–better than the previous games Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto 3.

Rockstar really added some pointless crap, probably to appeal to a larger audience. I almost felt like I was playing The Sims (why is this game still on the top 10? I mean, really, they have to run out of idiots to buy it?) when I had to work-out CJ (your character), muscle-up CJ, feed CJ, go out on dates with CJ’s multiple girlfriends, and worst of all, DANCE DANCE CJ.

The game starts off sort of slow at first, with a lot of emphasis on story. Not a particularly wonderful story either, I didn’t really get into it, and almost stopped playing because of how boring it was getting (one of the missions is to drive your homies to the equivalent of the Taco Bell drive-thru).

The girlfriends suck (not in that way). Probably alluding to the fact that I don’t have a girlfriend myself (ehhh… after the last one), I took great glee in shooting all the girlfriends (who weren’t crucial to the story) in the head with my AK-47.

One of things that bothered me about the Vice City game in the series was how much smaller it was than Grand Theft Auto 3–San Andreas rectified this completely, the game world is HUGE, with the performance much better than GTA3. Part of the story, your character wakes up and asks “Where am I?” to which you’re given the response “In the middle of fucking nowhere.” And, you are! It took me 10 minutes of driving in-game (though, I later found out faster ways) to get back to the part of the map I was previously.

You can tell they didn’t give too much thought into the PC port with respect to game control. Controlling airplanes is next to impossible to do with the keyboard. Not until I took out my gamepad could I even get the airplane to stay level in the air. What I thought was the absolutely most difficult mission in the game (and all 3 of the 3D ones, and actually was pretty difficult in the original 2D Grand theft Auto) was the RC missions, particularly the RC plane. Luckily, apparently you don’t have to win this mission to complete the game. The camera movement when driving is not too great either (different than from previous games), but you get used it after a while.

So, yeah, I liked it. Best single-player game I’ve played in a long while. Too bad there is no multiplayer.

Topic:

Video Games