Richard Jones' Log

Just some quickies today:

• OSDC is only a couple of weeks away and the program is looking quite good.
• My OSDC talks are progressing, but slower than I'd hope since I've spent most of my time in the last couple of weeks doing the proceedings book and Abbey's party.
• I'm booked for PyCon and waiting for rego to open.
• Selenium has assertTextNotPresent but the docs and implementation are identical to assertTextPresent (same for verify...) which is a bit of a shame. Bug report here.
• Alex is still making great progress on pyglet, even given various platform dependent bugs/features.
• The Python Journal has been re-launched as The Python Papers. Same content, just a different name. We have a domain so there will be a prettier website eventually I hope.

I got a new disk drive from a friend and plugged in last night.

Of course it wasn't easy...

When I booted it up, I got the strangest thing. "Waiting for root file system" which then times out. I don't know if you've ever been thrown into the "ash"/"busybox" minimalist environment that you get when boot fails, but it's not fun ;) I had to try to figure out what was going on ...

It turns out that Linux was trying to mount my root filesystem (sda3) from the new disk - which didn't actually have a partition "sda3". Even though I plugged it in as drive #3 on the motherboard, and the BIOS detected it as drive #3, Linux ordered it as drive "sda" because (presumably) it's an SATA-1 drive and the existing two drives (which used to be sda and sdb) are SATA-2 drives. "1" sorts lower than "2" I guess :)

I eventually figured out that the drives had been re-ordered, and then figured out which files to edit to make it all work again (though there was some guesswork when editing the grub menu.lst). My RAID-1 array was broken as well since it used to refer to sda4 and sdb4 and now it couldn't find sda4 but could find sdc4. I ended up with two RAID disks mounting sdb4 and sdc4 independently. Fortunately I could just delete one and add its disk back to the other array, wait for the rebuild, and all's well again.

The OSDC 2006 tutorials are open for bookings. I've also put up the first cut at the program. It's looking really good :)

As an exercise for myself I've WSGI'fied the web interface for Roundup in the latest release.

It required some changes to the way the web interface works. Up until WSGI it was sending responses by first sending an HTTP response code and then sending some HTTP headers (sometimes headers were sent in various places) until finally the headers were finished and then the body was written.

WSGI requires that you have your response code and headers all figured out when you call start_response. This wasn't a terribly big problem to solve - I did it all during two train trips ;)

So now Roundup has a BaseHTTPServer interface ("roundup-server"), a regular CGI interface, a mod_python interface, a Zope interface and now a WSGI interface which, given support code, can do all but the Zope interface and then some :)

The Python Journal has been resurrected. We're still sorting out some bits, but we're pretty happy with the first issue. I'll be helping out on the technical side, sorting out typesetting and the website. There might even be some articles from me, though I'll be dealing with OSDC 2006 first.

The first issue (of volume 4 - we're picking up where the previous Python Journal incarnation left off) has the sort of mix of articles that we're hoping for in the future. An article on general Python programming and an academic article that is more focused on research. We're also open to articles from specific areas of Python use, like PyGame, databases, web development, and so on.

If you have article ideas, please contact Tennesee!