Rocketmonkeys Posts

Solved: getting "No module named functools" error in virtualenv after changing Python install folder

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:59:24 -0500

I upgraded my system from 32-bit to 64-bit, and some paths changed. I had a virtualenv setup for a project, and it no longer worked after upgrade. Running "activate" gave me this error:

ImportError: No module named functools

The problem? The virtualenv points to the old python EXE path. In the virtenv folder, there is a file \virtenv\lib\orig-prefix.txt that still contains the hardcoded path to the old python folder ("C:\Program Files\Python27"), and needed to be changed ("C:\Program Files (x86)\Python27").

Bad Verizon, no Galaxy Nexus car dock?

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 01:00:02 -0500

I have a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon, and it's great. Leagues better than my old Samsung Nexus S (Aka T-Mobile Vibrant), which itself was a very good phone.

It's the "Nexus" phone, which essentially means it's where Google shows off it's newest stuff unencumbered by the phone networks. Except that this one is missing Google Wallet, since Verizon wants their own solution to win. Ironically, Verizon's own pay-with-your-phone solution is absent from the phone as well. More of a "if we can't do it, we're sure not going to let you do it either" mentality.

One of the best features of the iphones is their dock connector. There are tons of accessories, and most of them fit most iphones & just work. Even with the newer dock connector, there's sure to be tons of accessories that are made for that new connector.

What does android have? A ton of different phones, and none of them have any type of dock connector. They lack even the capability of those neat accessories.

So the Galaxy Nexus has some really neat pins on it's side, which can easily interface with accessories, and provide some of that missing functionality. Granted it's only on one of the many hundreds of android phones out there, but at least that's a start.

The twist? Samsung does not make a car dock that uses these pins for the Verizon version of the phone. The GSM version works just fine; slip the phone in the dock, it auto-changes to car-mode, starts piping music through your car, etc. The Verizon version? No connection.

To add insult to injury, the Verizon version of the car dock (which lacks all the neat functionality anyway) was discontinued either right after or right before it started selling (there's still some confusion on that one).

What the heck is going on? Where are the Galaxy Nexus CDMA accessories? Why isn't Google trying to foster a library of accessories that are compatible with all phones? Just one of the (many) glaring flaws of the Android ecosystem.

Community (TV Series)

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 01:00:02 -0500

This is, by far, the best television show I think I've ever watched. Definitely worthwhile.

It's a ridiculous comedy, but the writing/characters/attention-to-detail is amazing. Sometimes I get the urge to crawl into the screen & hang out with my study-friends.

GO HUMAN BEINGS!

Tightly Coupled vs. Loosely Coupled

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 01:00:03 -0500

Intuitively, you'd think that tightly coupled systems would be better. More integration, more sensible overall layout, everything plays nicely with everything else.

Maybe if each individual piece were perfect, that would be true. However, most of the time any given piece of software you're using has quirks, bugs, and limitations. That means sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with the non-perfect nature of a given piece of code.

A couple things that loosely-coupled software have - well defined interfaces & good separation. If you have no control or visibility into the internals of another piece of code, then you have to rely very strongly on the interfaces, and keep all your own code very separate. That means that between these two complicated pieces of code, there are a limited & well-defined amount of interactions that can happen. That helps a ton with debugging.

I'm sure if a tightly coupled system was made well, and behaved properly, that would be a great system to work within. However, given the choice between tightly coupled or loosely coupled software, loose wins.

Microsoft software (specifically ASP.NET) is a good example of this. When something goes wrong, it touches so many different behind-the-scenes pieces of software that it's incredibly daunting to even understand what's going on, let alone debug the very subtle & rare situations that trigger a given bug.

The web-development world is a good example of loosely-coupled software. You can nearly mix & match any of the given technologies at will - flash, JSON, javascript (both client & server side), web protocols, etc. And they all interoperate, and are nearly the most cross-platform/browser/machine/device software in existence today. I'd venture to guess the web wouldn't be what it was had there been more tightly coupled software driving it.

That's not to say tight-coupling doesn't have it's uses. Just that it's quite a liability, and more often than not tends to backfire.

There is no "should" in "testing"

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 21:50:02 -0500

When testing, there is no "should" or "should not". For example, "This should work".

There is only "it did work" or "it did not work". Should implies some type of assumption, which is the opposite of testing. Testing is the result; what actually happened?

Obviously this has to be compromised a bit in the real world. We cannot test something under the exact real world conditions that they'll be used in. If the conditions were exact, that's no longer a test; that's just actually using the thing. So we have to choose specific situations & circumstances as a test environment.

But the terminology should remain consistent. A specific task or item has not been tested if we have to say something like "It *should* work in this situation". We should be able to say "During testing, this item *did* work in this situation".

The Tourist

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:56:58 -0500

There are spoilers here, but I don't think they matter. A mysterious lady needs to lead police away from her criminal husband, so she picks a man at random. She leads him on, which in turn leads the police to believe he is her husband, and this innocent tourist gets in the middle of gangsters, police, interpol, etc.

Sounds very intriguing, and it probably should have been. But it wasn't. for some reason even with decent actors (Angelina Jolie & Johnny Depp), and with some action sequences, the whole thing feels... flat. There's not much excitement or investment.

And in the end, the big question is whether or not Johnny Depp (as the mild mannered innocent tourist) is actually the criminal husband or not. He's not until the last 2 minutes of the film. And then... surprise! He *is* the husband! Except that it's not really a twist if everyone's expecting it all along. So no real surprise there.

So in the end, I feel like the premise could have turned into a much better movie than this.

I fear the impending zombie apocalypse

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:07 -0500

Lauren and I were discussing whether the impending apocalypse would be zombie- or robot- based. I vote robots, because they're already here, they're everywhere, and I may possibly be unknowingly helping them bring about their eventual rule. She votes zombies, because they're very popular in movies right now.

I'm not a very worrisome person anymore, but it actually does give me a bit of anxiety to think about a zombie apocalypse. It feels like despair. Where would we go? What weapons would I have access to? How can I physically carry my entire family if there were no vehicles?

I guess it comes down to faith. Do I have more faith in my hacking skills to bring down a robot tyranny, or my crowbar-wielding talents to bludgeon any attacking zombies? I'm not sure yet. I feel like I really need to answer this question so I'm ready. I may be watching too many (or not enough) movies.

Sucker Punch

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:07:11 -0500

I was excited to see this one when I saw the preview. Girls fighting dragons & demon samurais with ninja swords & machine guns. What's not to like. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, and it is. But with great special effects, I thought this might be a neat crazy fantasy movie.

Warning signs went off when I found out that the movie was based around a girl trapped in a mental institute, and she used her imagination to fight for her freedom (which explains the dragons & guns). Those type of surreal movies can work when they artsy or deep (The Machinist), but this did *not* look like a deep movie. It looked like someone took a piece of paper, wrote "What do boys think are cool?"... and then took way too many of them and put them in one movie. I really wasn't looking for a deeper meaning to this one.

Good thing too. On the plus side, it's very stylistic, the special effects are amazing, and there's a lot of cool stuff to admire here. If they had chosen one fantasy setting and made a movie out of it, they could have had a pretty neat dragon fighting / zombie / world-war one steam punk / or girl SWAT team type of movie. I liked the hand-to-hand and gun maneuvering when they weren't obscured by way-over-the-top matrix 2/3 style camera motion. Makes sense - I found out the Bourne Identity fight choreographer worked on this one. Good stuff.

But the bad - the entire thing is a mess. The overall plot is confusing and strange. The text (you really can't call it subtext in a movie this shallow & obvious) is something about freedom, but it doesn't really stick. There's a lot of fantasy / surreal / layered reality here, and while cohesive it still doesn't make much sense. Why do this? What's the point? What ties this all together? Last, this movie makes you feel dirty. It starts with a step father sexually assault his young daughters, then with a mental institute where the male orderlies are sexually abusing the patients (which I suppose explains their escapes from reality), and to retreat from this they live in a fantasy world where they're prostitutes in a harem. Wow. This is like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (original title of that film in the original Swedish: "Men Who Hate Women"), but without the substance that makes it more than just watching women get abused. Note: special effects & zombies, while cool, are not a substitute for substance.

In the end, I think this is exactly what it looks like. A boy wrote down all the things he thought was cool, and crammed them into one movie. Eliminating half of them and filling the rest with substance would've made this a pretty cool movie. Also, more clothes for the women - they must've gotten cold only wearing half their costumes all the time.

Upcoming program: Gmail Imap Sync

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 02:08:57 -0500

I've seen this problem come up a few times before - multiple people need to receive & respond to incoming email, but need to coordinate so there's no overlap. In my case, I need to be able to do email support where multiple people (including myself) can respond to support emails, but also I can immediately see if someone else has emailed already.

I use & really like gmail, so I want it to be there. If I have to log into a separate site/service/page to receive the other email then that's already a disadvantage. I really like the convenience of having all my email (personal, business, business #2, etc) in one place.

Receiving email is easy - just setup a filter on gmail to forward all incoming email to the other people.

But outgoing email is harder. I could just BCC the others on every outgoing email, but I'll forget. A solution that works some of the time (or even most of the time) is not enough here.

The solution - a simple script that takes 2 IMAP accounts, does a simple filter to select the important emails (such as all FROM / TO email for @companyname.com), and sync them to the other account. The useful part - this works on both incoming & *outgoing* email. So every email I send from my work account is automatically copied to the other staff's email. It's pre-labelled, so it shows up in the "companyname" label in gmail. They can then mark as read, label, archive those emails separately from me.

It's very simple, but incredibly helpful. I think this would be a really useful thing for a lot of people in similar situations - need to respond to email as a unified group, but not wanting (or able) to switch to a full customer relations management type software. I've been using this for a while now, and it's been working great - completely transparent, which is awesome.

Now the problem - how do I release this? Open source? Free-for-personal, fee-for-commercial? Web-based service? If I can get around the need to store IMAP (ie. Google Account) passwords at all, then I'd probably opt for a web-based service. We'll see.

X-Men: First Class

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 01:27:44 -0500

I was really looking forward to this, even after the worthless junk that was the Wolverine prequel. Overall, it was decently good, and it was fun to see the whole "discovering your powers" aspect of things.

However, some really confusing castings here. January Jones - I'm not sure Emma Frost was supposed to be that... blank. Emotionless. Not cold, just vacant. Sadly it reminded me of her SNL performance.

And Kevin Bacon as the evil German Nazi mad scientist/doctor? He is creepy and all, but really? For some reason I feel like Nicolas Cage was the first choice for this role, and that's not a good thing. And what's up with Bacon's complete lack of German accent?

The most important part, the story behind Xavier and Magneto, was probably the best part. Both actors did well, and setup perfectly the rise & fall of that duo.

Even though overall the movie was good, there was this constant feeling of cheapness; it was a bit distracting. Like the cinematography (which at points seemed made-for-tv quality), the campiness (a decent amount of cliche one liners), and some confusing bits (like the end when Magneto & Xavier "split" - just seemed to be lacking a few scenes to make it more believable.).

I was most interested in Jennifer Lawrence. She's cast as Mystique here, but she's also in the upcoming Hunger Games movie which I'm really looking forward to. She's not bad, but I felt like Mystique here was really lacking any presence/power. It makes me less hopeful for the Hunger Games, but maybe she'll rally.

Next up: hopefully Paul or Hanna. I'm *really* excited to see Hanna.