For the longest time I couldn’t get into the IntelliJ IDE for software development, however last year I tried out PyCharm and loved it.  One of the key things for me when dealing with an IDE is their VIM support and JetBrains has one of the better implementations of VIM I’ve used in an IDE.  Recently I noticed the performance of PyCharm had fallen off to the point where it was becoming unusable.  Little things like moving up and down in the editor window sometimes had 0.5 – 1 second lag times which is totally unacceptable.  My laptop is an old Dell D830 with a Core2Duo 2.0 GHz with 4GB of memory so it is getting a bit dated but still… I was almost ready to head back to the Ecilpse platform in order to save my sanity when I thought I’d try one more time to find an answer to my performance woes.

There are lots of tricks out and about that provide advice on performance improvements, most are common sense… don’t use network drives for files, have enough RAM, blah, blah, blah.  I knew none of these were my issue.   Finally, however, I saw something that caught my eye, something about the JVM having performance issues with Intel’s graphic card EXA acceleration method which my laptop uses.  The fix was the simple addition of the following to the pycharm.vmoptions file.

-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false

I’ll be the first to admit that this trick didn’t make PyCharm a screamer however it is certainly usable again and hopefully I can squeeze a few more months out of my old Dell

No tags Hide

I’ve been working with Celery, Twisted and Cyclone recently on a side project I have going on, however the integration between Celery and Twisted is not ideal for asynchronous programming which prompted me to jot down some notes for what I’ve worked out.  Hopefully this will be useful to someone, also if anyone wants to offer a better way I’m all ears .

Celery has some built in methods to allow you to check the completeness of a remote job by calling the successful() method on a returned AsyncResult object.  For example you can do something like this…

(more…)

No tags Hide

As many of you know that follow my blog I’m an avid user of Linux and Mac. I haven’t had a full-time Windows PC since around 2001, so when I need a BIOS update it can sometimes be painful since most of the tools for updating a PC’s BIOS are written for Windows. Recently I needed to update my Dell D830’s BIOS to A15 from A08 and had to do some serious Googling to figure it out so I thought I would jot it down for others.

Before we begin you’ll need two things installed on your Linux machine…

1. The first thing you’ll need is the dellBiosUpdate program. Depending on your distro you’ll need to Google around and find the appropriate package for your distro that contains this program and it’s associated libraries.
2. Second you’ll need either Wine installed or an old Windows PC lying around.  My wife has an old Dell Windows machine so I chose to use it rather than bloat my Linux distro with Wine.

That’s it for prerequisites, the rest is easy. (more…)

No tags Hide

Ouch! I let one of my domain names expire on Tuesday and BAM someone pounced on it. Not normally a big deal unless it’s worth something, this one was. It wasn’t that it was valuable monetarily, however it was the primary domain I used for my Wordpress MU site. I suddenly found myself with a half working website, not good. Took me an hour or so to piece everything back together so I thought I’d share it.

1. Stop lighttpd
2. I had to change my DNS records at my provider and update with a new domain to take over for the lost one .
3. Modified /var/www/wp-config.php variable DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE with the new domain
4. Modified /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and replaced the old $HTTP["host"] entry
5. Unfortunately WP sticks the domain name of your primary site EVERYWHERE in the database which was a real bummer.  After I had found it in more than a few places I decided I’d better dump the database, replace using vi and then import the database back.
6. mysqldump -u username -p wp_databasename > databasename.sql
7. I then used vi to do a global replace of the old domain with the new
8. I then dropped the old database and recreated it with the same name.
9. Importing the database is easy with mysql -u username -p wp_databasename < databasename.sql
10. Restart lighttpd

I think that’s it.  It seems to be working again and hopefully this will help someone out of a jam in the future.

Word of caution:  I’d do a backup of everything before I starting and I also can’t promise that this will work if some WP plugin is doing anything strange with the domain name.  Good Luck.

No tags Hide

Originally published in Open Source Business Resource January 2010

“…success comes entirely from people and the system within which they work. Results are not the point. Developing the people and the system so that together they are capable of achieving successful results is the point.”

Leading Lean Software Development

Recently, that quote stirred some controversy among my peers. The part about “results are not the point” was hard for some people to understand and come to grips with. Aren’t results always the point? Well, as with most things, “It depends”. The people and community that evolve around an open source software project will ultimately determine its success. Even if the core team launches the project with spectacular productivity and results, this phase of evolution will be fleeting if the necessary processes and community to make the project a long lasting success are not put into place.

This article presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to ensure not only results, but a system that encourages productivity and longevity.

(more…)

No tags Hide