2008-03-12
Humor - If Version Control Systems Were Airlines
If Version Control Systems Were Airlines
Just a bit of geek humor that I ran across and felt like sharing. 
2008-03-08
Interesting History - Charles Fraser-Smith
Charles Fraser-Smith - The man who was ‘Q’
I can’t remember how I originally found this page, but I finally remembered to blog about it. For those who don’t know, Charles Fraser-Smith is the real life man upon whom Ian Fleming based “Q” in his James Bond novels. Considering how clever some of his World War 2 spy supplies were, I think any James Bond fan will like this bit of history.
2008-03-03
Quick Tip - GTK RadioToolButton With All Buttons Unset
In case you were unaware, GTK+ doesn’t let you set_active(False) on every single button in a RadioToolButton group. One must be pressed at all times.
So, if you want to have a user interface where it’s possible to have none of them pressed (for example, using RadioToolButtons for “Zoom 100%” and “Zoom to Fit” and regular buttons for “Zoom In” and “Zoom Out”), you need to use a little trickery.
self.zoom_100 = self.wTree.get_widget("zoom_100")
self.zoom_fit = self.wTree.get_widget("zoom_fit")
self.zoom_manual = gtk.RadioToolButton(self.zoom_100)
zoom_100 and zoom_fit are the RadioToolButtons as defined in my Glade XML file. The trick is zoom_manual. It is now part of the button group, but I’m not adding it to the user interface.
PyGTK Tab-Completion
PyGTK - EntryCompletion hacked up to give nicer tab-completion
While working on a batch organizing tool, I found out the hard way that GTK’s EntryCompletion is not meant for people who want speed. (It’s a memory aid, not a speed aid) I also couldn’t just switch to PyQt or wxPython because they all do basically the same thing.
As such, I hacked the GTK auto-complete up a bit so that it behaves more like shell auto-complete. (It doesn’t do anything until you hit Tab. When you do, if there’s one match, it’s completed. If there are multiple matches, it pops open the normal auto-complete list so you can pick one.
2008-02-27
Setting memory limits on Linux
You might not be aware of this, but since some time during the glibc 2.3 era, Linux apparently doesn’t enforce the RSS memory limit. (ulimit -m) My tests seem to confirm this.
As such, the only way I could find to limit a program’s memory allocations was by the VIRT size (ulimit -v)… which can differ a lot from the RSS. (Upon which the “percentage of memory used” value in system monitors is based on, if you weren’t sure)
