Thoughts, ideas and moohoo
After about a year, we finally found some time at work to factor out "strict require" functionality for Grok applications from our internal code base. It's called megrok.strictrequire.
When using this package, all views that are registered in your Grok based application, are required to have an explicit grok.require directive set in the view component. This provides a first safety net for unknowingly opening up views in your application.
We tried to order a new Macbook Pro (yah!) from the Apple Store. However, both attempts failed at the moment of credit card verification.
The reported error was PaymentReentry.FullDollarFailure.
WTF. What's that supposed to mean?
Today I called the store. After explaining that somehow the credit card transaction failed, the guy immediately asked "You got the dollar failure, sir?" Sounds like a common situation.
Turns out that our order was exceeding the per-transaction limit on the card. Makes sense in a way, so I suggested the guy to get the error reporting improved. "Can't do that sir, for privacy reasons".
Huh? Why can you tell me the reason for the error over the phone, but not in the online store?
Ever since I was working on my thesis in '98 I'm using Logitech's "Marble FX" trackball. Apparently I'm not the only one hooked to it, keeping me RSI free. In the past eleven(!) years I collected some spare marbles as Logitech decided to only produce it for a year or two, without making a proper equivalent replacement.
But now even the spares are dying on me… The buttons on one of the spares aren't clicking reliably anymore. And the ball in the other one isn't moving smoothly as one of the gliders inside broke off. Luckily the third, the one I use at the office, is still working. But for how long?
I'm afraid I need to look for an alternative as even ebay only lists a couple used Marbles at the moment and looking at the pictures, they're very much used - which isn't suprising for a 11 year old trackball - or you're paying through the nose for one, or it's only shipped within the US. Bah.
Logitech lists one possible replacement: the Cordless Optical Trackman. That's the only trackball apparently where the ball is moved by the fingers, not the thumb. Unfortunately it is, duh, cordless. I'd rather have a more reliable wire, but oh well.
Maybe the Mediamarkt has one on display so I can give it try there. But if someone still has a Marble FX lying arround…
About two years ago we bought a Volvo 245. Whether you think its pretty or not, this car is a classic.
Beside being a classic, which may be nice in itself, its also very very spacious. And that's convenient when you're (still cough) renovating the house and like to go camping during holidays.
Another reason to buy this car (second hand of course, at the time already 201.000 Km on the odometer) was that it is a car that let's you do maintenance yourself. If you want to. Under the hood there's plenty of space around the engine block and all parts are big and reachable and there's not much electronics getting in your way. Great for getting your hands dirty.
Last short holiday's return trip was a bit of anxious ride. The temperature gauge wasn't in the comfort zone. It actually was reaching almost into the red zone. Does not make for a relaxed drive.
This weekend I took the plunge and replaced - myself - oil, oil filter, spark plugs. I checked and cleaned the air filter and most importantly decided to drain the cooling system, replaced the cooling liquid and also replaced the thermostat and cleaned the radiator.
Of course something needs to go wrong as well.
One of the hose connections on the radiator broke of. Just while I was filling the cooling system with new coolant. And since it was sunday afternoon by then, I could basically stop right there.
Yesterday I had to arrange for a new radiator. I ordered one at a more-or-less local car shop that does Volvo in particular. He returned my call with good news: he had a radiator in stock. So I picked it up - by bike of course.
So, yesterday evening I replaced the radiator. All connections were good to go now and I went for a test drive. The temperature gauge is happy now :-)
Just released the fourth alpha version of Grok. We're slightly overdue for a real "one dot oh" release, but there're some nasty issue that really should be solved before. This release in particular was triggered by an accidental indirect dependency on zope.container brought in by grokcore.view. Since the version for zope.container was not pinned, it could pull in newer versions. And unfortunately there was a recent release that would break Grok…
This is fixed now by getting rid of this dependency and "going back" to a dependency on zope.app.container.
Anyway, the release process is well documented by now and, even though it takes some time for the procedure to complete, it is not very complicated.
Hopefully this release solves more problems than it'll cause :)
My version of the ReST parser plugin for Zine is here: http://jw.n–tree.net/code/rest_parser
I'm used to type in ReStructured Text. So hacked up a Zine plugin parsing "ReST", including basic support for sourcecode:: python blocks that get syntax hilited.
Here's a demo:
class MyClass(object): """My cool class. Kewl, ain't? """ def __init__(self): self.foo = 'foo' self.bar = 'bar'
<root> <child_1>with text node</child_1> <child_2 with_an_attribute="value"> and more text </child_2> </root>
The plugin needs a bit of pollishing…
Posting from my iphone. Certainly doable.
class Cow(object): def moo(self): print 'Moohooo!'
After the downfall of output.n–tree.net, first priority was to resurrect mail services. And now there’s a blog again.
The idea being: more frequent updates, various topics and eventually have the technical topics aggregated. We’ll see.