o(ther)l/log

If you install a buildbot (a very nice tool, by the way) on MacOS X 10.4, and if, when clicking on an ongoing log in the waterfall display for the buildmaster, you observe something like a nice python exception ending in:

        data = f.read(self.BUFFERSIZE)

with an ugly [Error 9]: bad file descriptor on the log file.

Then, you might be interested in the following excerpt from the CVS ChangeLog file, on 2005-07-19 (post 0.6.6):

* buildbot/status/builder.py (LogFile): remove the 't' mode from
    all places where we open logfiles. It causes OS-X to open the file
    in some weird mode that that prevents us from mixing reads and
    writes to the same filehandle, which we depend upon to implement
    _generateChunks properly. This change doesn't appear to break
    win32, on which "b" and "t" are treated differently but a missing
    flag seems to be interpreted as "t".

I tweaked my copy, works fine now.

To play with parenthesis again.

(define (unzip file) 
           (run (unzip ,file)))

(for-each unzip (glob "*.zip"))

A few minutes before, after my n-th failure to remember another syntax in a shell script:

$ sudo port install scsh

I have to admit that I still have a soft spot for Lisp and Scheme, even after years without writing a line of code. After all, it was the second language I learnt - well before Pascal or C, and the LISP book was one of the first in my CS shelf, and was joined a few years ago by the utterly brilliant book by Christian Queinnec describing the magic in LISP implementations.

... in my copious free time.

• A Ruby on Rails app for network monitoring. I always wonder if the complexity of the various (open source) network monitoring systems I tried come from the domain of the architecture of the solutions that tend to grow layer after layer. With something like ruby snmplib, sparklines, GraphR. Ok, I know, this is the perfect example of something I'd like to do just to play with funny libraries. I admit.
• The mythical UI-friendly personal banking software, with Cocoa and CoreData.
• A bunch of scripts extracting data from Spotlight meta-information, synchronization data and feeding a big RDF database. I love to play with real-world data.
• Continue my mindmapper proto, integrate it with my small notetaking app.
• I want to learn OpenGL and I'd like to code multi-agent systems again: implement a reactive agents swarm in a 3D world.

Conclusion. As always, time is the only scarse resource.