Tools on Tony Andrew Meyer

GitHub "sync fork" silently failing

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 10:40:26 +1200

(Post theme: Oops! I Did It Again by Britney Spears)

Posting because I’ve hit this three times now and each time not remembered the solution until I figured it out again, in the hopes that writing it down will prompt my memory next time and avoid a fourth “figure it out fresh” cycle.

At work (in the team I’m on), we develop in the open using public Github repositories. To introduce a change, we fork the repo, create a branch, and submit pull requests to the upstream main branch.

Possible gmail break-in

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:09:49 +1200

When I logged into gmail this morning, I saw the message that I dread the most - detection of an unusual access. There was a connection (two days ago) from a server in Malaysia, although it’s actually an AWS server (Amazon web services). There are two possibilities: the good one is that this is something that I’ve previously given access to my account, accessing it via an alternate method (e.g. Backupify can access my mail to back it up, and they use AWS) so that it showed up an unusual. The bad one is that someone was using AWS to bulk-attack accounts and got in. In favour of the good one, as far as I can tell, no email was sent - I can’t see anything amiss at all. The email account is the central lockbox for everything, of course, so it’s possible that it was just used to break into other things, or the email content was retrieved. My password (changed now, of course) was a random 8-character string of lower-case alphanumeric characters, so not particularly simple to break (although not difficult either, given sufficient resources). I never give out the password to anything that I do not completely trust, and nor do I give out access via other methods (e.g. oauth, openid) unless I trust those services too. I had intended to turn on two-factor identification, but hadn’t got to it yet. I’ve done that now, for the main account at least. My password is now over 30 characters long, including upper and lower case and punctuation - I probably should have changed this a while ago too. For now, I’m leaning towards the good possibility, so I won’t be completely resetting everything that can send a password reminder to my gmail account. I’ll be keeping an eye on things as closely as I can in the next week or so, though. If you see anything suspicious come from me, please let me know.

Trac to iCal

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:05:38 +1200

One project I work on uses Trac and has a custom “due date” field (it doesn’t really have milestones - updates are more granular). While this is useful, one problem is that I don’t check this Trac instance every day, and so sometimes I’ve missed deadlines because I haven’t noticed that they are due. However, I do check my calendar every day (multiple times a day). It seems like exporting this “due date” value into my calendar will help with this. This little script creates a calendar that can be subscribed to. I run it once a day (due dates don’t change very often), and have iCal set to update once a day, so it should work fine. If it’s of use to you, use it (no restrictions). Let me know if there are things that can be improved! It requires the Python iCalendar module, which I already use for parsing public holiday data.

Apple's Dog Food

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:26:53 +1200

The saying goes that you should eat your own dog food. It seems to me that Apple should be doing this with respect to their iOS (specifically iPad) applications. Unfortunately, it’s their apps that I have most to complain about.

Missing iPad versions

Firstly, why do they have applications that aren’t universal? (Or at least don’t have an iPad version)? I probably don’t have all of Apple’s apps, but three that I do have, and use, are stuck in the ugly 2x mode. I use Remote all the time. An iPad version would be great - basically the same as the small version, but all the controls could be on screen at once, rather than having to switch between “Control” mode and menu selection. The “Now Playing” screen could probably always be displayed, too. Texas Hold ’em: I don’t use this a lot, but it’s a reasonably good, simple, poker game. Basically nothing needs to be done to the interface, except add higher resolution graphics and flick the iPad bit. It would be much more playable at the higher resolution. I get the feeling this was written as a demo, but so little work would be required to update it. Mobile Me Gallery: ok, so Mobile Me is pretty much a joke at this point, apart from “Find My iThing”. Still, I do have some photos there, and there must be a few other people. While we are waiting for Mobile Me to turn into something worth using, why not update this app? There are plenty of good photo browsers that show how it can be done, and showing off photos is a great use of the app. Alternatively, build Mobile Me support into the Photos app.

IronPython editor postscript

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:43:26 +1200

I earlier tried various editors I was considering using to teach IronPython. One of the glaring omissions was Eclipse/PyDev, which has built-in support and is a very well-known IDE (particularly in the Java community). The main reason that I skipped Eclipse was that when I was searching for an IDE to use professionally about five years ago I tried Eclipse (for Python, C, and C++ development) and I really hated it - the IDE was very slow (especially to launch), it was very Java-centric, and just didn’t suit me at all. I’d briefly tried Eclipse before that as well, with similar results. Over the last few days, I decided that I was probably being unfair, and since this was a choice for my students rather than for me personally, I really ought to try Eclipse (with the PyDev extensions). I also noticed recently a post about using IronPython with NetBeans - I’d heard of NetBeans before, but only in a Java development context, and since I stay as far away from Java development as I can, I had no experience with NetBeans at all.

Choosing an IronPython editor for teaching

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:25:28 +1200

The Northtec D520 “Programming” course is changing to IronPython (from Visual Basic) this year, so I have to figure out what editor/IDE the students should use. In some ways, Visual Studio would be ideal, since they need to get exposed to that during the course (and it’s an excellent IDE, with a really great form designer), but since there isn’t any real IronPython support in Visual Studio (hopefully coming in 2010), it’s not really a viable option. Instead, they’ll start with a simpler editor, and then briefly learn how to use Visual Studio’s form designer and subclass the forms in IronPython (as described in IronPython in Action). The requirements here are a bit different than when selecting an editor/IDE for actual development work. Firstly, it needs to be free (at least for educational use), and it needs to be reasonably simple to use the basic functionality (since these are first-year students). Code-completion isn’t necessary (on the one hand, it helps them out while they are learning - on the other, they rely a little too much on it), nor is a built-in debugger, or support for complex projects. I considered seven different editors/IDEs - there are a couple of others, but they either seemed too young (e.g. IronPython IDE, IronEditor), or inappropriate for other reasons (e.g. ZeusEdit is not free, I can’t stand Eclipse. UPDATE: I decided to try Eclipse and Netbeans after all).

Useful / cute googling

Mon, 11 May 2009 17:44:53 +1200

Inspired by a Coding Horror post. Things that I would demo to an “Intro to IT” class if I teach one again.

I don’t think you can get directly to NZE listings (i.e. “NZE:AIR” doesn’t work like “GOOG”) - you have to go via google.com/finance. I don’t think UPC codes are used here, either. Looking up a VIN number would be great, but I’m guessing that doesn’t work, and can’t be bothered going and reading my VIN at the moment).

Google Calculator Wrong!

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:14:39 +1200

Either I’m missing something (quite possible), or Google’s calculator converts between joules and calories incorrectly. According to pretty much everyone else (e.g. here), a calorie is 4.184 kilojoules. According to Google’s calculator, it’s 0.004184 kilojoules.

technorati tags:google, calories, joules, calculator, wrong

Delicious Library queries via SMS

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:20:34 +1200

A few months ago, I finally got around to cataloging all my books using Delicious Library. There were a few reasons for doing this - my insurance company wants a list of all the books in order to insure them for new-replacement value (rather than the few cents they probably consider they are worth), if anything did happen to them, I want to be able to print out a list and give it to a bookstore with an insurance cheque an wait for all the boxes to arrive, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s becoming difficult to purchase new books because I have to remember whether I’ve already got the book (or have just read it, or have just heard of it). It’s also just about impossible for anyone else to buy me a book (my favourite gift), because I might already have it (unless it’s on my Amazon wish-list, which I keep fairly up-to-date). I guess it’s also nice to keep track of books I’ve lent out, but that isn’t so common that I need software for it. Just putting the books in the Delicious database covers most of these, apart from the issue of avoiding purchasing duplicates. Delicious Library can sync to an iPod (I don’t have one, but my wife does, so with a bit of work copying the library across accounts, that can be done), so that somewhat solves the issue of buying duplicates myself. It’s not perfect, though - for a start, I need to ensure that I have the iPod with me (easy to do for planned purchases, but not impulse buys). In addition, it seems that only 1000 books were sync’d - I’m not sure if the iPod is limited in the length of “notes” it can display, or if Delicious Library is limited in the number of books it can sync, or if something just went wrong in the process. This doesn’t at all help anyone else, of course, unless I give them a list. Putting the list online is possible, through third-party utilities, but the one that I found that worked resulted in a page with so many images it would take forever to load, and while I put a custom-made version online that would load more quickly, printing the list out and taking it with you, or waiting until you could look at it online, isn’t particularly practical. What I needed was a way to query the list using something that I and others would always have on hand. That’s really only a cellphone, either via voice (complex) or SMS (simple). ipipi, which I used in the past to send SMS messages from a computer, allows me to receive email from an SMS, which I could use to trigger an Applescript. While I could probably have done the whole job in Applescript, writing the search in Python was much simpler. Originally, the plan was to only respond via SMS if my laptop was at home, because only Skype for Windows allowed sending SMS messages, and so I had a rather complex script half written that would switch the input device and use text-to-speech over a Skype voice call if the laptop wasn’t available. Happily, the latest beta of Skype for OS X does allow SMS sending, so the response is always via SMS now. I don’t know if this will be of use to anyone, and it’s pretty simple stuff (this is why scriptability is good - if Delicious Library had proper scriptability, I wouldn’t have to bother with the Python script at all), but here it is: using terms from application "Mail" on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule tell application "Mail" repeat with thisMessage in theMessages set msgSource to source of thisMessage try do shell script "echo " & quoted form of msgSource & "| /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin/python2.5 /Users/tameyer/book_sms.py" on error errMsg number exitCode display dialog "Something unexpected has happened to search: Exit Code = " & exitCode display dialog "Error Message:" & errMsg end try end repeat end tell end perform mail action with messages end using terms from

Checking for new podcasts at a specific time in iTunes (Windows)

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 12:42:31 +1200

As far as I can tell, you can’t tell iTunes when you want to check for new podcast episodes - it simply adds the periodic time (e.g. 24 hours) to the last time a check was done. My ISP has changed their broadband usage system so that half of my monthly transfer allowance is “off-peak” (from next month, 2am to 10am). This really doesn’t suit me well, as I typically spend only about an hour to two hours (8am or 9am to 10am) of this time online, so what I end up with is a huge chunk of unused allowance, and maxing out my “peak” allowance. I don’t want to change my habits so that I schedule everything for download. The point of having broadband was that I got what I wanted when I wanted it. The exception to this is podcasts, which are all time-shifted anyway, so I don’t care when they download. They also account for a reasonable portion of my downloads (in terms of size - particularly the two video podcasts). So I really want these to download these around 4am. One way to do this would be to get up at 4am one day and manually update. However, I like my sleep. That also means that if I ever decided to ‘check now’, I’d have to redo this. So, my solution is to write a little Python script that tells iTunes (via COM) to update all podcasts, set iTunes to only update manually, and have Windows run this Python script as a scheduled task. If you want to do anything with this script, help yourself (it’s really only 6 lines).

Skype 2.5 (Beta)

Sat, 13 May 2006 11:34:09 +1200

I found out (via GeekBrief.tv) that a beta of Skype 2.5 is available, so downloaded it. I use Skype quite a lot for text messaging (because MSN is so unreliable), as well as some SkypeOut calls (if the lag was a bit less, I would happily switch to it for all my outgoing calls, since Telecom has put me in Helenville, which is nowhere near me and so I make no local calls) and the odd Skype call (I have one in-law, my parents, my sister, and one friend that I can call - not a large selection!).

Sharing OS X Address Books between users

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 17:37:21 +1200

Until today, I hadn’t bothered entering any contacts into my Address Book in OS X. I did have lots of contacts - but they were all entered in my wife’s account, since she uses it more, and it was convenient to have everything in the one place.

Today, however, I started using Delicious Library (more about that later, but in short: get it), and it integrates with the Address Book for maintaining borrower lists. So I really needed the entries in my Address Book, too.

Google Calendar

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 10:24:21 +1200

A post on TUAW pointed me towards Google Calendar - it’s just fantastic. Now, I really only have experience with Outlook’s Calendar functionality, which I used pretty heavily in 2002, 2003, and 2004 (and some of 2005) when I was sitting in the office at Massey all day. Since I switched to working at home I’ve intended to start using iCal, but just haven’t got around to it, and since these days I do most of my work on a Windows laptop, that isn’t an ideal situation anyway. I’m also using gmail more and more [does anyone still need invites these days? I have heaps] for mail that I do want to interupt me, and leaving the browse-at-leisure mail to be processed with Mail (which does get a copy of all the gmail mail, as a backup). So gmail is open in Flock most of the time. So I can see myself using Google Calendar (gCalendar, TUAW calls it) quite a lot, especially if a little calendar turns up in gmail next to the (unused by me, at this point) chat box. The interface is great - my connection is only 64Kbs at the moment, and it’s still pretty smooth. All the niceties that you expect from a Google product are there. Try it out yourself! technorati tags: Google, Mail, Calendar, email

Tools

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 11:28:57 +1200

(Moved over from my Massey site. Future entries will be separate, but in the Tools category). These are the tools that I regularly use, and which I would obviously recommend: Coding

Python is my preferred programming language.
Mark Hammond’s pywin32 extensions for Python are invaluable, especially the PythonWin IDE.
py2exe is perfect for creating Python executables.
Inno Setup is a great, free, installer builder for Windows.
SpamBayes is the best spam filter there is .
Kodos is fantastic for testing/creating regular expressions (particularly ones to be used in Python). [more]
wxPython is my preferred Python GUI development library.

Editors I’ve given up on the editors I was using, and for the moment, I’m just using PythonWin for everything. The search may resume… PhD Research