The Piehead News

Perforce Question

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:57:18 GMT

Let's say I'm submitting to Perforce, and I use "revert if unchanged" to avoid spamming the changelists.

How do I prevent P4 from creating a zombie named changelist if the submit ends up empty because all files were the same as in the depot?

Update:

    # Get the file into the default changelist
    p4_out_add = p4.modify(files=[xml_path])
    print "Add",p4_out_add
    
    # Take the file out of the changelist if it hasn't changed
    p4_out_revert = p4.revert(files=[xml_path], unchangedOnly=True)
    print "Revert",p4_out_revert
    
    # Only submit if the file is still in the list
    opened = p4.opened(files=[xml_path])
    print "Opened",opened
    if opened:
        p4_out_submit = p4.submit(files=[xml_path], description="TODO")
        print p4_out_submit

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:32:32 GMT

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2009/07/09/the-firefox-3-5-fiasco.aspx#7143969 (Comment from "A Mac user")

Dude, you're complaining about the font when the line width is too long and the line height is too small?

That's obviously a blog that the author only ever sees through the editing interface (and possibly an RSS reader), and not the actual page.

Update: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

TextMate

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:30:18 GMT

PROTIP: If you're using TextMate with Project+, and clicking into TextMate causes a several second delay every time, go into the Project+ config and make sure you don't have any unwanted VCS badges enabled.

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:00:36 GMT

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/04/alaska.parnell.palin/index.html

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell: "I am high as a kite."

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:02:37 GMT

http://www.pragprog.com/magazines

So if this is free, and "on the web"... why bother with the PDF step? It's not like the layout and typography is anything to write home about anyway.

Impedance

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:09:08 GMT

I'm taking a DB schema that's back-formed from an XML representation and trying to get it into Django, so content can be edited and served back out as XML documents.

There's a certain amount...satisfaction that's missing from this exercise, since the objects being edited are ultimately more "document like" than relational. I suspect some amount of proxy models or abstract inheritance will be needed.

I would say "hopefully the schema itself is pretty stable", but I think it's early enough here that it's not, which will mean "fun" database migration work in the future.

There's got to be a better solution for this... but what?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:33:57 GMT

The Pirate Bay going legit? I don't understand. How will I be able to pirate new Mad Men & Venture Bros. episodes?

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:43:04 GMT

Had to add a product to my cart on Amazon to see the price... wow, a full $1.50 off the normal $99.99 price. Lame.

Blueberry Garden

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:04:16 GMT

I tried Blueberry Garden last weekend and I have to say, I didn't get it.

There were good bits of presentation and production, sure, but the amount of "game" involved could fill a thimble. Which would be OK, except that there's not much else to fill the gap.

To be crass, it should not have been a $5 Steam purchase; it should have been a pre-production demo released alongside an "actual thing", as a bonus feature.

To add insult to injury, when you beat the game and get the designer's notebook URL, the drawings posted there are far, far more interesting than anything that appeared in the game. An underwater calliope would have made up for a lot of "so that's it, then".

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:50:09 GMT

http://www.forbes.com/part_forbes/2009/0713/internet-video-games-multiplayer-gaming-gold-mine.html

(I work at a Gazillion studio.)

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:37:13 GMT

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_an_Extension

the ID of the extension. This is a value you come up with to identify your extension in email address format (note that it should not be your email). Make it unique. You could also use a GUID. NOTE: This parameter MUST be in the format of an email address, although it does NOT have to be a valid email address. (example.example.example)

Wow, way to describe the expected contents of that field, guys. Unique email! Or a GUID! But an email! Except not a valid email!

Fallout 3 DLC

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:47:26 GMT

I haven't tried any of the Fallout 3 DLC yet. I keep thinking I ought to, and then I keep not doing it.

The main story quest in Fallout 3 is just so bad. Maybe the story isn't bad per se, but the super-linear, totally scripted, forced choices main quest just don't mesh at all with the rest of the game, which is a reasonably decent exploratory dungeon crawler.

So, ironically?, I should probably be all for the DLC, since it gives you more stuff to explore, more weapons to get, more people to kill, etc.

Except that none of that really seems to matter. Once you're a 20th level bad-ass, you're a 20th level bad-ass. Sure, Broken Steel cranks up the level cap, but it also has to crank up the difficulty to give you something to do with all those extra levels.

And it's not like in a Diablo 2 style game where most dungeons regenerate and you can always play through them again in hopes of a better random drop. There's no extra "+1s" to hope for; once you have the best stuff you have the best stuff, and there's no real extra reward along that vector to hope for.

So, am I missing something by not getting in on some hot DLC action?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:22:05 GMT

Morethanseven: Ant for Web Developers I and II

Ugh. For these things, a simple 1-or-2 line shell script would suffice.

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:19:59 GMT

Alertbox: Stop Password Masking

Welllll, sure when I'm at home or on a mobile device with small viewing angle, I don't really need a masked password. But if I'm not at home... say, at work (not that I don't trust my coworkers) I don't really want my passwords plain-text visible to random passers-by.

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:24:10 GMT

Got some fixes and new things deployed at work today. I was going to add "thus rendering the week not a total loss", but hell, it's only Tuesday yet, so there's plenty of week left to go.

The build server (CruiseControl) is still freaking out. Apparently it things that failing a build means run that build again after the waiting timeout, instead of, say, waiting for a check-in to P4 that is within the set of monitors paths.

Which means that I need to either reconfigure it, try some other build server, or throw up my hands and let the QA team's manual tests be the only tests.

None of these choices are very palatable, but I'm considering taking a look at Hudson instead.

Famous last words, perhaps, but how hard can it be to write that subset of a "build server" that I actually need on a project?

I tried BuildBot and "didn't get it"; the fact that it is distributed front-and-center is great for those projects that need that, but was a big impediment to getting something up quick and easy just to try out.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:52:00 GMT

Adobe UI Gripes: Alien Skin Bokeh
Jesus H. Christ, this makes me embarrassed to be a programmer, to be in the same field as people who do shit like this.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:48:26 GMT

Was there anything at work I didn't screw up today? I mean, I didn't bring down any production servers, but neither the build, database, or QA servers were cooperating with me today.

Kinda feeling like something needs to be burned to the ground, then the ground salted; probably the build scripts.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:45:25 GMT

Is there any real advantage over an "XBox360 Elite" vs the normal + HDMI cable? A "$100 advantage", that is. I mean, other than being BLACK instead of WHITE.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:03:26 GMT

Classic Game of the Week Ultima VII: The Black Gate

I absolutely could not get into this game, even out of the first town, because of my damn party members complaining about being hungry. Fuck, guys, aren't you adults? How did you get this far in life without being able feed yourself?

It was different in, say, Ultima 4, where you also had to buy food for your party, since U4 had a much, much more abstracted view of the world. Your party members didn't talk after joining, for instance.

Having to buy food, while carrying a tradition forward from previous games, is just a weird, un-fun sop to reality by the '90s. Which is a shame, because apparently the actual game part of the game was fun?

(Do the modern U7 engines let you turn off food, by any chance?)

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:02:11 GMT

I wrote some code this week that wasn't completely shitty, so that's something.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:06:18 GMT

Today needs a reset button, but it's not like I would do anything different the next time around (or end up getting any more done.)

Sending extra data to Django Admin templates

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:52:30 GMT

(Mostly for my own benefit, this is against Django 1.1)

Django has a "generic views" system that lets you send additional data to the templates by using a extra_context parameter.

If you dig through Django's Trac, you'll see that this extra_context support was also added to the auth views as well as the admin views, but is much less documented there.

To send extra stuff to an Admin template, put this in your ModelAdmin:

class MyAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ... field list and other options ...

    # Override this to modify the changelist, look in the source to ModelAdmin
    # for other view getter methods.    
    def changelist_view(self, request):
        return super(MyAdmin, self).changelist_view(request, extra_context={
            # Put extra fields here and your template will get them in the request.
            # Don't accidentally change a variable that the base templates expect.
        })

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:42:13 GMT

New Microsoft "Technologies" should include details on shipping MS for-pay products that use them.

Interests may vary over time

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:30:26 GMT

This is the middle of my 4th week at the new job. I'm not sure how long you have to work somewhere for it to stop being the "new job"; I'm also still the most recent hire, but I expect that to last a while.

My initial, primary projects are internal websites being developed with Django. I'm doing development work on a MacBook Pro, and deploying to CentOS (which is a de-branded, re-branded Red Hat Enterprise Linux; I'm not sure why the world needs that, but then again I'm not one of those "don't use our copyrighted logos OMFG" freaks either.)

Noticeably absent: .NET, which I've spent the last 5+ years working in daily.

(Most of the company is on Windows, though, and there is development in C# that I assume will at some point I'll have to look at in an emergency capacity.)

Not using C# / .NET on a day-to-day basis (and not using it for any hobby work) is an excellent way to stop caring about what's going on in the .NET world.

So Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 are in development, blah blah blah. I forget if Microsoft will be introducing yet some other different way of talking to SQL Server (ADO.NET, DAAB/EntLib, L2S, EF) in that release or not.

If reading the Visual Studio 2010 First Look page doesn't make you want to punch all marketers, then you're not the kind of developer I want to work with.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:22:40 GMT

Some times, when faced with a problem, you may think to yourself "I am not an idiot." Now you have two problems.