tommy's scratchpad - open source, technology

Hello Docker

2017-06-11T13:16:00+00:00

For decades now my dev life has been thanks to headless servers in the basement (these days running Debian) which I simply SSH to and work remotely. This has served me well for so long although serious box hugging was at play here. Being a reproducible workflow maniac and having virtualenv helped as well.

Fast forward a few years and add to that mix dev work on my MacBook Pro. It's 64-bit with an SSD and 8GB of RAM and is great for trips. In this case I was less liberal with installing libraries and packages given it's a shared computer (I recently had to do a full macOS re-install to fix performance issues).

Enter Docker. Here I am able to start up a full development environment very easily without affecting my MacBook per se (only a Docker install is required). Publish to Docker Hub and done. Pull and run at will. My initial requirements for the repo are pycsw development, but this will grow over time.

Of course I'm really late to the party (Sean Gillies thought he was late!), and I'm sure there are better approaches, but I think I'm finally feeling Docker. Good times!

Why I Love Linux

2009-12-11T21:48:00+00:00

$ uptime
 21:20:01 up 112 days,  9:06,  1 user,  load average: 0.05, 0.09, 0.18

Sun, Oracle and MySQL

2009-04-20T08:32:00+00:00

http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/. I wonder what this will mean for MySQL?

Using Python to parse config files

2009-04-13T09:18:00+00:00

Alot of tools out there have some sort of configuration which, at run time, is read and used in the process accordingly. When writing tools, my config file format has always been something like:

title: My Tool

# commented out line

description: This is my tool.  # another comment

Since I'm using Python for much of my scripting these days, I decided to write a small parser to handle this type of config. So here's what I've come up with:

import fileinput, re

def parse(file=None, delim=':'):
    '''
        Parses a config file formatted like:
        foo: bar
        # comments: out line
        - comments allowed (#)
        - empty lines allowed
        - spaces allowed

    '''

    d = {}

    if file is None:
        return -1

    for line in fileinput.input(file):
        if not line.strip(): # skip empty or space padded lines
            continue
        if re.compile('^#').search(line) is not None: # skip commented lines
            continue
        else: # pick up key and value pairs
            kvp = line.strip().split(delim)
            if kvp[1].strip().split('#') is not None:
                d[kvp[0].strip()] = kvp[1].split('#')[0].strip()
            else:
                d[kvp[0].strip()] = kvp[1].strip()
    return d

Seems w

My Shell History

2008-04-12T20:15:00+00:00

Neat post by Matthew Perry. I couldn't help but run the same command:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

188 cd

151 svn

113 vi

88 ll

60 sudo

53 more

40 make

40 ./dd.py

30 ./run_test.py

30 ls

dd.* is my tempfile name prefix for quick and dirty scripts. run_test.py is from running the MapServer msautotest regression test suite when developing and testing code.

What does your shell history look like?

UNIX Magic

2007-09-11T15:23:00+00:00

Saw this via digg earlier today, and couldn't help but appreciate the "magic" of UNIX for the nth time.

My first foray into the UNIX world (years ago) was the result of a colleague (Mike Adair, of mapbuilder fame) who advised me to take UNIX training. I needed to script and chain processes together as part of a system to create a ground control point database. The rest, as they say, is history.

As the years go by, and as things become more packaged, "easier to use", and "frameworks" popping up everywhere, I have found time and time again that the trusty UNIX command line and tools have saved the day when the pressure was on (this includes stuff like perl and [recently] python scripting), without the overhead of setting up grandiose configurations and such.

How did you get started with UNIX? Stories involving hacks and / or someone over your shoulder looking in amazement are welcome :)