stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley

Blathering for Thursday, 04 September 2008

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

20:00: Mikal shared: Google's Chrome Tops Opera in Market Share - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

Huh. Chrome is apparently more popular than Opera already. I wonder how reliable this data source is?

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Executing a command with paramiko

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:11:00 GMT

I wanted to provide a simple example of how to execute a command with paramiko as well. This is quite similar to the scp example, but is nicer than executing a command in a shell because there isn't any requirement to do parsing to determine when the command has finished executing.

#!/usr/bin/python

# A simple command example for Paramiko.
# Args:
#   1: hostname
#   2: username
#   3: command to run

import getpass
import os
import paramiko
import socket
import sys

# Socket connection to remote host
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.connect((sys.argv[1], 22))

# Build a SSH transport
t = paramiko.Transport(sock)
t.start_client()
t.auth_password(sys.argv[2], getpass.getpass('Password: '))

# Start a cmd channel
cmd_channel = t.open_session()
cmd_channel.exec_command(sys.argv[3])

data = cmd_channel.recv(1024)
while data:
  sys.stdout.write(data)
  data = cmd_channel.recv(1024)

# Cleanup
cmd_channel.close()
t.close()
sock.close()

Tags for this post: python() paramiko() Comment

Implementing SCP with paramiko

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:28:00 GMT

Regular readers will note that I've been interested in how scp works and paramiko for the last couple of days. There are previous examples of how to do scp with paramiko out there, but the code isn't all on one page, you have to read through the mail thread and work it out from there. I figured I might save someone some time (possibly me!) and note a complete example of scp with paramiko...

#!/usr/bin/python

# A simple scp example for Paramiko.
# Args:
#   1: hostname
#   2: username
#   3: local filename
#   4: remote filename

import getpass
import os
import paramiko
import socket
import sys

# Socket connection to remote host
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.connect((sys.argv[1], 22))

# Build a SSH transport
t = paramiko.Transport(sock)
t.start_client()
t.auth_password(sys.argv[2], getpass.getpass('Password: '))

# Start a scp channel
scp_channel = t.open_session()
          
f = file(sys.argv[3], 'rb')
scp_channel.exec_command('scp -v -t %s\n'
                         % '/'.join(sys.argv[4].split('/')[:-1]))
scp_channel.send('C%s %d %s\n'
                 %(oct(os.stat(sys.argv[3]).st_mode)[-4:],
                   os.stat(sys.argv[3])[6],
                   sys.argv[4].split('/')[-1]))
scp_channel.sendall(f.read())

# Cleanup
f.close()
scp_channel.close()
t.close()
sock.close()

Tags for this post: python() paramiko() Comment

Robot Visions

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:07:00 GMT

This was a pretty short read -- in fact I read it on the bus into work this morning. That's mainly because there are only three short stories in this book which aren't covered in one of Asimov's other robot short story collections. The three stories were good, but I am not sure they were worth owning the entire book for.

LibraryThing link for ISBN 0451450647

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Blathering for Wednesday, 03 September 2008

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:15:00 GMT

11:15: Mikal shared: paramiko: ssh2 protocol for python

Paramiko is awesome. I've been using it for a while now for all my SSH client in python needs, and its really nice.

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The Belgariad

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:36:00 GMT

The Belgariad is a fantasy series by David Eddings. There are five books in the series, although there is also a follow series called the Mallorean, as well as three tie in books. The series follows a small farm boy as he grows up, discovering along the way that his relatives are famous, he's important to the history of the world, and that he has to defeat an ancient evil. The five books in the main series are:

Year	Title
1982	Pawn of Prophecy
1982	Queen of Sorcery
1983	Magician's Gambit
1984	Castle of Wizardry
1984	Enchanters' End Game

Tags for this post: book() David_Eddings() Comment

Enchanters End Game

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:29:00 GMT

This is the final book in the Belgariad. Its a good one, although knowing there is another series involving these characters makes it feel a little less final to me. I enjoyed it though.

LibraryThing link for ISBN 0345338715

Tags for this post: book() David_Eddings() Comment

Blathering for Tuesday, 02 September 2008

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:15:00 GMT

12:00: Mikal shared: How the SCP protocol works - Jan Pechanec's weblog

Ever wondered how the scp protocol works? I did just now, and this page is quite useful.

15:15: Mikal shared: Returning Fall TV Shows 2008 - Spoilers, Previews and Casting News - AOL Television

Bugger. I quite liked New Amsterdam, and it seems that its not going to be returning in the fall TV season in the US. Oh well, just another show that Fox has ruined.

15:15: Mikal shared: New Fall TV Shows 2008 - AOL Television

Some of the new shows sound ok too. Note that the "Kath and Kim" about to air in the US is an American remake of the Australia show.

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Chrome user agent

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:24:00 GMT

I am sure this will come in handy... The chrome user agent looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

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Books read in August 2008

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:38:00 GMT

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TCP_DENIED/403 for cache accesses using squid

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:21:00 GMT

I just spent some time debugging why squid wouldn't work for localhost, but seemed to work for other clients on my network. To cut a long story short, Linux for some reason wasn't using 127.0.0.1 for traffic to localhost. It was instead using the public IP address for the machine, which didn't match either the localhost ACL or the local network ACL. I am sure there is some fancy reason that this is the case, but if you see this problem, then consider checking your localhost ACL.

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Blathering for Saturday, 30 August 2008

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

10:45: Mikal shared: Credit-card companies killed Mythbusters segment on RFID vulnerabilities

Wonder why the MythBusters haven't covered how hackable and trackable RFID tags are? Well, here's the answer...

17:00: Mikal shared: Improving Blog Latency to Benefit Readers | etbe - Russell Coker

Blog (or in fact any website) latency is incredibly important to me. If I click on a site in a search result list and it doesn't load in under a second or so, I'll give up and go to the Google cache instead. I guess if that means you care about me seeing your site instead of a cached version, you need to make the site reasonably fast.

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MythNetTV release 5

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:11:00 GMT

New things in this release:

There is now a users mailing list at http://lists.stillhq.com/listinfo.cgi/mythnettv-stillhq.com
Moved to a public SVN server at http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn/
Added the 'justone' syntax to the download command
Another try at using gflags. This means that all the command lines have changed slightly.
Moved the core of MythTV out of the user interface file.
Started writing unit tests
Changed user output code so that it doesn't insist on writing to stdout. You can now write to other file descriptors, which makes things like unit tests much easier to write.
Added video/msvideo to the enclosure whitelist
Added HTTP download progress information
Added a flag which turns off the prompts for markread (--noprompt)
Patches from Thomas Mashos
- Search ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt, /usr/share/mythtv/mysql.txt and /etc/mythtv/mysql.txt in that order for MySQL connection information
- A manpage
- setup.py
video.py now has a simple command line interface to let you query it
Fix update of inactive programs bug per http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5580005&postcount=4
Better DB error handling
Included a COPYING file with the right version of the GPL (it was missing before)
Fixed a bug where programs would be downloaded more than once (found with a unit test!)
Started raising exceptions instead of just sys.exit(1). This should make life easier for user interfaces in the future
Default to using storage groups for storing recordings before falling back to the RecordFilePrefix. This makes the behaviour: use a storage group named "MythNetTV" if it exists; use the default storage group if it exists; use the value of RecordFilePrefix.
Transcode avc1 videos, because some need it
Force ASCII encoding of title, subtitle, and all fields in the database to get around feeds which use unicode which python / MySQL can't store correctly
If there is only one attachment to an item, and its not in our whitelist of video formats, then warn the user that you're assuming its a video file and then add it to the todo list
Slight tweak to the signature of video.MythNetTvVideo.Transcode()
Fix buf in RepairMissingDates which caused it to consistently crash
Fix typo in date warning code
Better handling of videos where the length of the video cannot be determined by mplayer

Release 5 is by far the best tested release of MythNetTV yet, with both unit tests and several users working quite closely with me to resolve problems found in the wild. You can grab your copy here.

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Castle Of Wizardry

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:55:00 GMT

This is book four in the Belgariad, and was as good as the others. This one only took a day to read, but that was helped a lot by the two hours I spent commuting to and from San Francisco today. This book is a little different than the others because it starts just as the quest for the Orb ends. Yet it turns out that the overall prophecy that the Belgariad describes is still incomplete, so the story continues.

LibraryThing link for ISBN 0345300807

Tags for this post: book() David_Eddings() Comment

Blathering for Friday, 29 August 2008

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:15:00 GMT

09:15: Mikal shared: CPU vs GPU - paintball version

The Mythbusters paint with a paintball robot at a Nvidia event.

15:15: Mikal shared: Amazon.com: android

Wow. There are heaps on Android development books out already. I guess most of them must be with the older versions of the SDK and pretty badly out of date already?

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Magician's Gambit

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:40:00 GMT

This is the third book in the Belgariad (Book 1 and Book 2). This book like the others was an enjoyable quick and easy read. I am starting to rethink my comments about these books being good for young readers -- it just occurred to me that a lot of people die in these books. They're all bad guys, and the violence isn't all that graphic, but I guess it might worry some parents.

LibraryThing link for ISBN 0345335457

Tags for this post: book() David_Eddings() Comment

Queen of Sorcery

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:10:00 GMT

This is book two of the Belgariad (following on from Pawn of Prophecy). This book was a good quick read, and I think they'd be a good mid level reading book for a child. I liked it.

LibraryThing link for ISBN 0345335651

Tags for this post: book() David_Eddings() Comment

Open Source video creation

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:53:00 GMT

For the upcoming MythNetTV release I am toying with the idea of asking the user if its ok to include a default subscription to an announcement video blog. This blog could be used to inform MythNetTV users of things like new releases, and important bug fixes if such things happen.

This raises the question -- if I wanted to mix creative commons licensed music with some still images (the announcements), what tool is the best to do that? Specifically open source tools please.

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First Family

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:59:00 GMT

I finished this book on the bus into work this morning (I had a pretty distracted weekend, and didn't get much reading done). This is the second book in the Amtrak Wars series, and takes place immediately after Cloud Warrior. The book feels like it is only half a book -- there is plot development such as learning more about Roz, meeting the First Family, and the Iron Masters, but there isn't much action. Basically I look back on the book and wonder what happened in it -- it would have been better to combine this with the next book and have a complete story in one.

LibraryThing link for ISBN 0671655671

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Please help me test trunk

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:42:00 GMT

I'm preparing a new release of MythNetTV, and would like some help testing the code, as I have re-factored how the user interface works and there is some risk that I have broken things in the process. You can get the code like this:

svn co http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn

That will create a directory called mythnettv, with a subdirectory named trunk, which is the latest development version of the code. You should probably create that directory somewhere where you don't mind a new directory being created.

The biggest change is that the command line syntax has changed slightly -- the dashes have been removed from the commands. Therefore, to update your list of feeds, you now use:

  mythnettv update

Instead of:

  mythnettv --update

And so on. This was done so that I could add "real" flags, which are used to change default values like where the database configuration is read from, as well as what the default location for the temporary data directory is.

"Real" flags which are currently supported are:

  --datadirdefault:  The default location of the data directory
    (default: 'data')

  --db_host:  The name of the host the MySQL database is on,
              don't define if you want to parse
              ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt instead
    (default: '')
  --db_name:  The name of the database which MythNetTV uses,
              don't define if you want to parse 
              ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt instead
    (default: '')
  --db_password:  The password for the database user, don't
              define if you want to parse 
              ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt instead
    (default: '')
  --db_user:  The name of the user to connect to the database
              with, don't define if you want to parse 
              ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt instead
    (default: '')

  --[no]commflag:  Run the mythcommflag command on new videos
    (default: 'true')

(These are the result of adding the gflags module back into the implementation).

I am hoping to release this version in the next few days, so if you find any bugs please send email to the mailing list.

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