May 2007 Archives
I finally got pissed off that I couldn’t run Java applications or Ruby Gems on my rented virtual server, because of memory limitations - 80 Mb just isn’t enough, especially when gem is as boneheaded as it is about reading in the whole gem index at once. So, despite having had such good experience with Bytemark, I decided that I can’t afford to upgrade to their next best server package, so I’ve migrated to Slicehost. Just as I had bought my 256 Mb “slice”, Bytemark announced that they would be upgrading my package to 150 Mb and 10 Gb of storage. Well, I’m sad to ditch them, but Slicehost is still offering an extra 100 Mb of memory at a slightly lower cost… no contest. Plus, my server had got into the Linux “too many packages installed just for the hell of it” phase and it’s almost easier to move between providers than to attempt to juggle my files and configuration around on the same VM while I reinstall it.
Anyway, my first impressions of Slicehost are very good: they know enough Web development kung fu to have provided very nifty, slightly AJAXy Web console apps and a nice slice monitor/DNS manager etc. And my slice was ready to use within 2 minutes of handing over my credit card details - that speaks volumes to me about knowing what you’re doing. I’ve now upgraded the site to Radiant 0.6 and have a few random articles in the pipeline - it’s nice to get out of the doldrums of worrying about which blog/CMS/whatever engine to use and to just get on with incoherently venting my spleen again :-)
Posted by Andy Buckley on May 28, 2007
While hacking together a generator cut combining system for Rivet I just got an enormously unhelpful error from g++, namely
from Projection.cc:3:
../../include/Rivet/Cut.hh:76: error:
`map<string, Rivet::Cuts::BinaryCut>' specified as declarator-id
../../include/Rivet/Cut.hh:76: error: two or more data types in declaration of
`map<string, Rivet::Cuts::BinaryCut>'
Fortunately I’ve seen this one before, though I couldn’t remember at first. It turns out that that’s C++ compiler error language for “you forgot the stupid semi-colon on the end of your inner class declaration”. Another reason to relegate C++ to the garbage bin of history! Incidentally, I just discovered that Bjarn Stroustroup used to be at my college in Cambridge… hopefully I’ll run into him at a dinner sometime and can bother him about his horrid creation.
And why blog about such a tiny and tedious topic? Well, the Google coverage of this issue could certainly do with being improved…
Posted by Andy Buckley on May 11, 2007
I just pushed a beta release of PyFeyn up to PyPI, the Python package index, for the first time. While pretty simple, I’m happy about the whole process - releasing bundled code to the whole community should be this easy! Here it is:
http://www.python.org/pypi/pyfeyn/0.3.0b1
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Posted by Andy Buckley on May 09, 2007
I just spent a couple of hours wondering why I suddenly couldn’t use files belonging to a particular group on my Linux system in work. For example, a directory is group-owned by a group called rivetgun, it’s group-writeable and calling groups tells me that I’m a member of that group. But I can’t write to it… what’s up? The permissions of the group look identical to those of other groups that are behaving as normal. Eventually, I try logging in as another member of the same group… it works fine! Okay, so it’s my problem, not the group.
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Posted by Andy Buckley on May 08, 2007
For ages I’ve wanted to have a network attached storage (NAS) system in the house, so my music collection, photos, reference documents and so-on can be accessed from one place. Last week I took the plunge and bought myself a new LaCie Ethernet Big Disk 1Tb - a whopping terabyte of NAS goodness. In the last five minutes, though, I just turned it off and packed it back in the box to be flogged on eBay. Here’s a brief description of the one week voyage from happiness to disillusionment.
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Posted by Andy Buckley on May 07, 2007
