import signal
class AlarmException(Exception):
pass
def alarmHandler(signum, frame):
raise AlarmException
def nonBockingRawInput(prompt='', timeout=20):
signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, alarmHandler)
signal.alarm(timeout)
try:
text = raw_input(prompt)
signal.alarm(0)
return text
except AlarmException:
print 'Prompt timeout. Continuing...'
signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, signal.SIG_IGN)
return ''
I've seen a number of mentions today of a bug that can cause a Snow Leopard user to lose all their data:
One user reports a way to recover the lost data. Since it's buried in a discussion thread, I'm reproducing it here (also fixing a typo pointed out by a reader of this blog):The problem appears to manifest itself on machines which had the Guest account option enabled under Leopard and were subsequently upgraded to Snow Leopard. Users booting their machines have reported that upon start-up, they have been logged into the Guest account. Upon switching to their regular account, the affected users have been finding all of their user data missing and unrecoverable except from a backup. [MacRumors.]
The files were still in /Users,
recovery was not too difficult.
1) su in terminal
2) mv username username.old
3) create account username
4) mv username username.new
5) mv username.old username
6) chown -R username username
I don't know whether it's a general fix. If you run into the bug and decide to try this solution, feel free to post your experience in the comments section!
We've made a substantial upgrade to the look and feel of our Flyfi.com web site. The site does a lot, and this release has been geared toward making the functionality more readily apparent and easier to use.
If you're a Facebook user, you might want to check out my company's FlyFi Community Playlist app which lets a Facebook community collaborate on a playlist... but it's more than a playlist because it also provides tracks related to the manually entered ones.
A fair number of the tracks are legally downladable free MP3's, from superb artists like Randy Newman (one of my personal top 5 artists), Ani DiFranco, Suzanne Vega, Dar Williams, and many others.
The source code link presented at the main post for my singleton mixin classes was bad until now. It pointed to an earlier version that didn't have thread safety or various other improvements. Sorry.
singletonmixin now deals with cases where you want to be able to include args in calls to S.getInstance() even after the initial instantiation.
Based on internal work and feedback appearing in comments on this blog, I've updated the Python singleton class I posted way back in 2004. That earlier post remains the place to get the code and place any further comments.
It now handles keyword arguments, and is threadsafe for singleton creation.
If you've been following developments in Iran, and particularly the Internet's essential role in reporting (and supporting) events, I don't have much to add.
If you haven't, I strongly suggest you go to Andrew Sullivan's blog and starting following him now -- as well taking a bit of time to look through his posts from the last couple of days. He's been doing a wonderful job. Far better than any mainstream news outlet, with the possible exception of the NY Times' Lede. (Although the Lede doesn't present as much detail and analysis as Sullivan does -- with the help of his readers and well-chosen links to other sources.)
One of Sullivan's readers sums up the key role Twitter is coming to play:
Ahmadinejad's and Khamenei's websites were taken down yesterday - I saw the latter go down within a couple of minutes because of a DDOS attack organised via Twitter. @StopAhmadi is a good source for tweets on this. The other important use of Twitter has been distribution of proxy addresses via Twitter. This would be how most video and pictures of today's rally have gotten out.
One amazing thing is that it seems at least conceivable that the protests would not have been as successful as they currently appear to be if Twitter didn't exist.
Sullivan suggests wearing green in support of the protesters. I think that's a great idea.
One of my more unusual pastimes is making up Tom Swifties. Examples of my efforts in this area include:
"She said I look like a common farm animal!" Tom said sheepishly.and
"Those damned cannibals! They're seasoning us with lemon juice!" Tom said sourly.
The NY Times is having Tom Swifty contest this weekend. Submissions include:
"My men will never mutiny," said the Captain blithely."
In the esthetic of the Tom Swifty, I believe that significant demerits apply to those where the description of the act of speaking doesn't really match the tone of what is said, such as this Times submission:
"She's got my photo in her locket," said Tom independently.
and this one:
"What's under this green jello," Tom asked sublimely.
Here are two particularly fine submissions, from Chris Doyle:
"I'll just have to kill the king," Reggie sighed.
"May I have this dance?" Fred asked gingerly.”
From an interview of Herbie Hancock and John Mclaughlin; they'd been discussing Miles Davis:
HH: We're not going to get rid of problems. I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn. This is something I learned from Miles, first. I had this experience that I've talked about a lot of times. I was playing with Miles and we were doing this concert in Stuttgart. This was one of the nights when the band was hot. The stuff was burning, Tony Williams was smoking, Wayne wasä JM: Scrambling those eggs. HH: And sweating. And Miles was just playing like God-like stuff that he played. It was just smoking. And then, at this one point, which was like a peak in Miles' solo, I hit this chord that was so wrong. It was just awful. It was in the wrong place and it was like boom, I just felt like I destroyed the music. And Miles took his breath and played some notes that made my chord right. JM: Damn. HH: I don't know where he found these notes but he just wiped away the chord being wrong. He made this chord fit. I was dumbfounded. I couldn't even play for about two minutes. He just blew me away and what it taught me was that Miles didn't hear it as a mistake. He just heard it as an event. He just trusted it and did his musician thing and found the notes that fit that thing. I said, wait a minute, this is a lesson not just for music but for life. Things that happen to you are events. It's what you do with them that determine whether they're going to be problems or solutions. This is the kind of thing that I hope to develop more in my life and spread. And it's not something for just musicians, it's something that everyone can spread. JM: I'm on your side. We've got to encourage responsibility. We're all in it together. We need each other desperately. Now more than ever.
Er, no actual relationship there. But
a) This is one of the most wonderful short articles I have ever read. It's about one journalist's brief but enormously rich encounter with Einstein.
b) My hypothesis in my previous post has turned out to be correct; when I type my name into Google, I am the top hit again.
This blog used to be very highly ranked on Google. But as of today, I can't find it there at all. Instead, it finds my old blog, which I haven't updated in years. But that one did get a huge number of hits at one point, due to posting some anti-spam mathematical ideas. So that may be the reason for its still having a decent Google rank.
I have been extremely busy with FlyFi, and posting on this blog has simply become a lower priority. One problem is that much of what I spend my time thinking about is business and technology ideas for FlyFi, which are not yet appropriate to share publicly!
Anyway, I was wondering whether, simply by posting this on my blog today, Google will see more activity and therefore make me findable again.
You may have heard that all 30GB Zunes died last night and will be working properly again 24 hours later. In case you're interested, the C function that caused the problem is displayed and discussed at ZuneBoards.
Basically, somebody did a poor job of leap-year handling.
Here's a great video debunking some of the McCain campaigns recent distortions/lies.
I've always liked McCain for being a "straight talker." Now it looks like he's decided he'd rather lose his integrity than lose an election. And it's working.
As I've noted on this blog before, the Internet gives us the possibility of strengthening the power of a truth through viral dissemination of that truth. If people don't know something, it's not going to have an effect on their thinking.
So, if you agree that people who can't be elected honestly shouldn't be elected, please spread this video around.
Suppose you want to divide a Python list into sublists of approximately equal size. Since the number of desired sublists may not evenly divide the length of the original list, this task is (just) a tad more complicated than one might at first assume.
One Python Cookbook entry is:
def slice_it(li, cols=2):
start = 0
for i in xrange(cols):
stop = start + len(li[i::cols])
yield li[start:stop]
start = stop
which gives the exact number of subsequences, while varying the length of the subsequences a bit if necessary. It uses Python's slicing feature to get the lengths.
That was written in response to an earlier cookbook entry which had the following one-liner:
[seq[i:i+size] for i in range(0, len(seq), size)]
I like that it's a one-liner but don't like a couple of things about it. If your goal isn't a particular sublist length but rather to divide the list up into pieces, you need another line to compute the size. And then it doesn't turn out too well. Suppose you want to divide a string of length 10 into 4 substrings:
>>> size=10/4
>>> size
2
>>> seq = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
>>> [seq[i:i+size] for i in range(0, len(seq), size)]
[[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6], [7, 8], [9, 10]]
Try setting size to 3 to get fewer substrings:
>>> size=3 >>> [seq[i:i+size] for i in range(0, len(seq), size)] [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9], [10]](Dissimilar lengths.)
Here's a briefer one-liner using the slice idea, which doesn't require you to compute the length, and does give the exact number of subsequences you want and with lengths that are more appropriately divided:
[seq[i::num] for i in range(num)]
The drawback there is that the subsequences are not actually subsequences of seq; seq is sliced and diced. But, all the elements are in the output and the subsequences are as close as possible to the same length:
>>> seq = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] >>> [seq[i::num] for i in range(num)] [[1, 5, 9], [2, 6, 10], [3, 7], [4, 8]]