technology: October 2004 archives

Football for the Lose

[ rakaur on Sat Oct 30 at 09:26 PM // category: eawr, programming, school, technology ]

So, we lost 20-28 today in the first regional game. It sucked. Pana was much more fun. I wouldn’t have regretted staying home.

In other news, I still find myself unable to find even basic documentation on Ruby that isn’t outdated. I really want to get all the information I can on this language (even though I believe Python to be the “right choice,” which I’ll go into). I need to get my hands on the second edition of Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide but it seems as if no one is.. ahem.. distributing it. I don’t have the $30-45 to shell out for it.

I still believe Python to be more elegant. Maybe it’s just me, but:

[x for x in li if os.path.isdir(x)]

just looks more natural than:

li.collect do |x|
    x if File::directory? x
end

And even so, with the first you’d wind up with everything that’s a directory. With the second you’d wind up with everything that’s a directory, and everything that’s not a directory replaced with nil. I see no way to prune this, either.

Update: You can apparently prune it with this:

li.delete_if do |x|
    x.nil?
end

But that’s still an extra step. A filter iterator would be more apt than collect/map in this case.

Update: Okay so I was tired when I posted that. Obviously you could just do:

li.delete_if do |x|
    !File::directory? x
end

My bad.

Anyway, back to having nothing to do.

Someone buy me this.

-- rakaur // 2004.10.30 @ 09:26 PM

Web Design With a Side of Potatoes

[ rakaur on Sat Oct 09 at 01:33 PM // category: life, programming, technology, web ]

It’s that time again!

I need a new layout for my sites (namely this one). I realize I haven’t had this one up very long; but, I’ve been using this layout for quite some time. So, if any of you layout-desiging fools out there would care to take a crack at it, I need:

Light on dark (ie, white text on some dark-but-not-black color);
A nice font that doesn’t look crappy like this one (eg, verdana);
A simple “liquid” layout (ie, horizontally centered, sidebar, content);
A main menu, and submenus for sections that need them.

I’ve been messing with it, but you know, I suck ass at layouts.

That reminds me, I need to figure out: Python or PHP. It seems mod_python is broken on the latest Apache, so I’m not sure. PHP is geared towards Web stuff, but you know, I hate PHP. Python is just so much cleaner and organized; and, for the simple stuff I do it’d work just fine (in fact, I already wrote a Python version of my blog). The only bad part about using Python is that there’s no (decent) Markdown implementation for it. There’s a few floating around on the Web, but they all do something improperly and they’re so hacked up in a Perlesque manner that I can’t figure out what to do with them. Porting that will suck.

Anyway.

We went up to Bunker Hill last night to shoot the potato gun. Holy shit, it’s loud. I mean like, it rivals something that uses gun powder as opposed to air and starting fluid. It doesn’t shoot quite as far as I thought it would, but it’s still pretty neat (and fun to shoot when it actually works).

I might have to get me one of those.

-- rakaur // 2004.10.09 @ 01:33 PM

The Python Rant

[ rakaur on Mon Oct 04 at 07:45 PM // category: programming, technology ]

I’ve posted a rant on things I don’t like about Python.

I’ll post updates here.

On a side note, I got moved right the hell next to the girl I want in one of my classes. Perhaps I’ll accomplish som… no, no I won’t.

-- rakaur // 2004.10.04 @ 07:45 PM

The X Windows Disaster

[ rakaur on Mon Oct 04 at 06:49 AM // category: health, life, software, technology, unix ]

I hate X.

Saturday, the picture tube in my monitor finally decided to shit the bed and died. It’d been doing wacky things like turning off and resetting itself for the last two weeks.

So, I go out and get a new one. Same size, same brand, same specs. I plug it in and lo and behold, all of my fonts in X are gargantuan for no reason. Now, please, someone explain to me why changing my monitor fucks up my fonts in X. Everything is still fine and dandy in Windows. So I redo my XF86Config and they’re still borked. Recompile fontconfig and they’re still borked. Recompile X and XFT and they’re still borked. Recompile GTK and they’re still borked. I don’t get it. I’m going to have to reinstall my entire OS because X won’t display my fonts correctly.

But wait, I can’t do that, either! A quick (ha!) scan with badblocks reveals that it is indeed my primary hard drive that randomly clicks and spins down and won’t spin up again for hours. Swift! I’m just going to wipe this computer and either a) sell it or; b) let it sit until I can afford a hard drive so big that by the next time I’d need a bigger one they’ll have holographic storage workly properly.

I swear to God I should just get a Mac.

On an unrelated note my back is worse than ever. I don’t know what the hell I did to it but I could hardly move at all last night. A night’s rest on a heated waterbed seems to have done some good, but I don’t expect that to last all day.

Hopefully I can make it through class.

-- rakaur // 2004.10.04 @ 06:49 AM

Regular My Ass

[ rakaur on Fri Oct 01 at 11:20 PM // category: programming, technology ]

Here’s the RE my friend and I wound up with:

pattern = r"""
           ^                  # beginning of string
           (?:                # non-capturing group
               \:             # if we have a ':' then we have an origin
               ([\w\W]+)      # get the origin without the ':'
               \s             # space after the origin
           )?                 # close non-capturing group
           (\w+)              # must have a command
           \s                 # and a space after it
           (?:                # non-capturing group
               ([\w\W]+)      # a target for the command (can contain '#' etc)
               \s             # and a space after it
           )?                 # close non-capturing group
           (?:                # non-capturing group
               \:             # if we have a ':' then we have freeform text
               (.*)           # get the rest as one string without the ':'
           )?                 # close non-capturing group
           $                  # end of string
           """

It allows me to remove the code that deals with removing the ‘:’, which is another speed up because string manipulation on any level in Python is mind-blowingly expensive.

-- rakaur // 2004.10.01 @ 11:20 PM

Regular Python IRC

[ rakaur on Fri Oct 01 at 08:12 PM // category: programming, technology ]

Definitely owning in IRPG:

rakaur, the level 52 destroyer of worlds. Next level in 7 days, 15:00:56.
sycobuny, the level 51 CockGrabber. Next level in 12 days, 23:52:30.
rintaun, the level 50 ultimate lego warrior. Next level in 0 days, 01:03:37.
madragoran, the level 50 gaidin. Next level in 10 days, 01:27:34.

In other news, I wrote a twelve-line IRC protocol parser in Python earlier. Actually, I wrote several. First I wrote one a la C, via string manipulation and concatenation, etc. Then I timed it parsing two million lines of IRC protocol (not realistic: it was the same two lines a million times). Then, I wrote one using a regular expressions. I immediately thought the RE one would be slower. However, after I wrote and looked at it I realized it was less than half the code to implement. When I timed it, it was only three seconds faster. So, I moved the re.compile() call to a global so it’s only compiled once per program run, and that shaved off about 30% of the time. Then, I fixed the argument vector counting and that shaved off about 10% of the time. All in all, the RE one was 60% faster than the string manipulation one (maybe because strings are immutable in Python and thus the interpreter has to build a new string for every operation).

I can tell you’re all quivering in anticipation, so here’s the code. I’ll paste the RE first (as of now; when my friend gets home I’ll ask him if there’s anything to optimize it as he knows far more RE than I do):

import re

# A regular expression to match and disect IRC protocol messages.
# This is actually 60.501% faster than not using RE.
pattern = r"""
           ^             # beginning of string
           (:\w+)?       # if we have an origin it starts with a ':'
           \s?           # space between words
           (\w+)         # there has to be a command
           \s            # space between words
           (\W?\w+)?     # if the command has a target it might be a #channel
           \s?           # space between words
           (:.*)         # anything after a ':' is one string
           $             # end of string
           """

pattern = re.compile(pattern, re.VERBOSE)

And here’s the parser:

def parse(self):            
    """Parse IRC protocol and call methods based on the results."""

    global pattern

    # Go through every line in the recvq.
    for line in self.recvq:
        parv = []
        parc = 0

        # Split this crap up with the help of RE.
        origin, command, target, message = pattern.match(line).groups()

        # Chop off the leading ':' on `origin` and `message`.
        if origin:
            origin = origin[1:]

        message = message[1:]

        # Make an IRC parameter argument vector.
        if target:
            parv.append(target)
            parc += 1

        parv.append(message)
        parc += 1

… and that’s about all I have for you today.

-- rakaur // 2004.10.01 @ 08:12 PM

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