A partition recovery story
So my dad tends to have a lot of really dumb computer problems that are either caused by him or some random virus/malware that he somehow manages to get on his system. And of course, I get to be ‘Mr....
View ArticlecRio Netconsole implemented in Python
The FIRST Robotics Competition uses the NI-cRio platform for the controller for the robots in the competition. There is a bit of functionality called ‘NetConsole’ which sends the stdout from vxWorks...
View ArticleWinpdb Remote Debugger for Python ported to RobotPy on vxWorks
I’m really excited about the idea of using python on our FIRST Robotics Team’s Robot this year, and one of the first things that got really annoying was the lack of debugging capability, since vxWorks...
View ArticleBPM Counter Plugin for Exaile 0.3.2
I’ve been starting to use my desktop machine at home a lot lately, so I’ve been looking for a cross-platform audio player that I can use that doesn’t annoy me. After a long search (and discarding most...
View ArticleUse GroupTagger to rapidly organize your audio files with Exaile 3.3.0 using...
Well, I haven’t blogged here in quite awhile, but it’s been a pretty busy year! One project I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on is Exaile, a cross platform music player for GTK+ (its free and...
View ArticleComments inadvertently disabled
Apparently at some point my anti-spam plugin decided to stop working. No wonder I haven’t had any comments in a really long time…. should be working now!
View ArticleDrawing in color in PyGTK
I’ve been playing with drawing on your own widgets in PyGTK on Windows, and I found it incredibly difficult to figure out how to draw something in color on a gtk.gdk.Drawable object using draw_line,...
View Articleglib.idle_add for tkinter in python
After doing a lot of python GTK+ work on Exaile, I’ve found that it uses glib.idle_add() extensively — and usually with good reason. idle_add is great if you want to ensure that whatever you’re calling...
View ArticleNotepad++ plugin to enable unindent on backspace key
When I first started using editors, I was a tabs person. I always set the tab size to 4 since I liked the way that looked, and used tabs instead of spaces. And it wasn’t really a philosophical reason...
View ArticleProblems with file descriptors being inherited by default in Python
Have you ever run into a traceback that ends with something like this? File "C:\Python27\lib\logging\handlers.py", line 141, in doRollover os.rename(self.baseFilename, dfn) WindowsError: [Error 32] The...
View ArticleVirtualKD 2.8 with VirtualBox 4.2
If you try to install VirtualKD 2.8 on VirtualBox 4.2.x, you get an error similar to this: Unable to cast COM object of type ‘VirtualBox.VirtualBoxClass’ to interface type ‘VirtualBox.IVirtualBox’....
View ArticleAward Winning FIRST Robotics Robot Control Interface
KwarqsDashboard is an award-winning control system developed in 2013 for FIRST Robotics Team 2423, The Kwarqs. For the second year in a row, Team 2423 won the Innovation in Control award at the 2013...
View ArticleAnother Python SIP wrapper for the tesseract OCR library
Tesseract is a pretty decent open source OCR engine that was developed by HP back in the day, but is now maintained as open source by Google. It has a C++ API that you can program to, and as you would...
View ArticleVersioned chef environments
I was just recently introduced to chef, and it has turned out to be a pretty useful tool for automating infrastructure. One feature that I’m using in our environment is chef environments. A bunch of...
View ArticleTool to implement ruby-inspired DSLs in python
This weekend, I created library to aid developers in creating neat little embedded DSLs when using python, without having to do any complex parsing or anything like that. The resulting DSLs look a bit...
View ArticleBeware of using Vagrant VMs on a bridged network
I love Vagrant. If you haven’t used it, Vagrant is pretty awesome. It lets you manage VMs + configurations really easily, and it’s a great development tool to use when you need to do rapid iterative...
View ArticleGlobal shared development folder on Vagrant
Vagrant is pretty awesome for development. One thing that I’ve ran into is that I use a lot of vagrant instances at various times, and much of the time I want to access my development files from inside...
View ArticleDownloading and uploading dashboards to/from a graphite server
I’ve been using graphite and statsd lately, and over lunch quickly whipped up this script to download/upload dashboard configurations to/from a graphite server. Here’s the code, use as you wish....
View ArticleAutomatically generating avro schemata (avsc files) using maven
I’ve been using avro for serialization a bit lately, and it seems like a really useful, flexible, and performant technology. To use avro containers, you have to define a schema for them — but writing...
View ArticleTransparently use avro schemata (.avsc) files in a python module
One of the cool things about avro is that it has bindings in a couple of different languages. However, I think the only one that has native code generation support for working with avro objects is...
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