I have nothing against gas/electric hybrid cars, really (in fact, I'd love to have one myself). But still, I'm afraid one of these days I will be killed by one.

You see, I am a primarily auditory person, which means I do some things rather differently than the predominantly visual majority. One such thing is crossing the street... I often forget to look both ways, because I just listen to hear if the cars are coming.

But hybrid cars, when they're driving in-town on the electric motors, are quiet. Not much louder than a bicycle. So several times on my walk to and from work I have stepped into the street only to be surprised by a hybrid vehicle zooming past me.

I'm such a bad example for the children.

One of the Christmas presents I begged for was the DVD of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and I received it with much glee. Over Christmas we watched it as a family a couple times, and it was great on the "big screen" (rather than the laptop). The other night I watched the DVD extras, and I must say: while there's the usual not-too-exciting filler like a "Making of..." mini-documentary, the piece "Commentary: The Musical" is really laugh-out-loud funny, full of the same somewhat irreverent humor from the show itself. I'm still chuckling to myself as I think about it. Recommended!

Adding the simplest little bit to a Python/PyGTK app today, I ran into a strange problem where my module couldn't import os.path. Mind you, I could do this from the Python Shell or from other modules, but this one gave some interesting errors:

• If I told it to import os, I'd get an error saying "AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'path'".


• If I told it to import os.path, I'd get an error saying "ImportError: No module named path".

Grr...

However, I found the solution on DiveIntoPython's page on Dynamic Importing: After dynamically importing with the line os = __import__('os'), I could call os.path methods just fine. Mind you, I'm not entirely sure why this works, but I figure it has something to do with the way that os.path has to dynamically load the operating system-appropriate module ('posixpath' or Unices or 'ntpath' for Windoze).

Maybe that will help someone out there who is having this same problem, since Google searches show a lot of questions about it, but few solutions.

My Sweetie & I have gotten into CraigsList lately, mostly for purchasing or selling used stuff.

But I had never thought of all the other great things you could use the site for, until I heard about this Washington (state) bank robbery.

The WSJ today has an article about Russian professor Igor Panarin, who for years has been predicting that the economic and moral turpitude of the United States would cause economic crisis and civil war, leading to the disbanding of the States... in 2010.

Two words: Clay Feet.

...to Python. I used to be so into Perl, but no more.

Those of you who program, or even enjoy comparitive languages as I do, will understand that switching programming languages is a bit of a religious conversion experience. In fact, one fellow recently parsed out which religions fit which languages, and it's quite funny.

Recently, I've been reading both Python and Ruby books, and even toyed with some Rails projects. Obviously there are a lot of similarities between the two—it seems that Matz borrowed (or should I say inherited?) many of the best features from Python. But there's something about Ruby—the overuse of blocks, maybe?—that can make it all a jumble, like when Perl code goes bad. But Python is so orderly... it's so beautiful, it makes my OCD side cry.

Recently, I've helped out with tweaks to a couple Open Source progects written in Python and GTK+, and found it remarkably enjoyable. Amusingly, both are similar programs which do the same thing: monitor a Zenoss server's event status from your systray (see Zapplet and ZenTrayIcon). Heck, Zenoss itself is written in Python and Zope, and has its own little Python shell for direct data access (called 'zendmd').

So now I understand what Randall Monroe (XKCD) was talking about in this cartoon. Simplicity and power go hand-in-hand.

This is irony: There's a huge Nor'easter storm outside right now with over a foot of snow and high winds... Three hours ago I walked a mile through through the storm to get to my office, where the A/C unit in the data center has failed... and I'm sitting here toasting (along with the servers, I'm sure) in 100 degree heat.

It's 85 degrees cooler outside right now, and I think that's where I'd rather be--since it would mean I was on my way home, instead of sitting here waiting for the HVAC guys to call back.

The office at my new job is very open, with half-height cubicles for around 50 people. While this model facilitates communication and camaraderie, it is also fairly distracting when you need to do some serious work.

However, I recently discovered a helpful little website that provides peaceful white noise/background sounds to help you focus; it's called iSerenity. I plug in the headphones, kick off The Sounds Of New York or Rain, and dig in to my work.

Seriously, it may sound kind of lame, but I've found it to be quite helpful. Be productive, and enjoy!

My iGoogle portal this morning pointed me towards the wikiHow article How to Cook Food in a Hotel Room.

I can top that. A long time ago—my freshman year of college, to be exact—my roommate and I found like 10 different ways to cook Spam using non-cooking-related appliances found in the dorm room.

Sure, we used the iron—it's alright. Boiled spam, on the other hand, is a mistake. But the best non-cooking appliance for your cooking needs? Fry up your Spam in a pan held above the halogen lamp—yum!

And by the way: you might find yourself needing these tips, as I have heard from multiple sources that Spam sales are on the rise during our "economic downturn".

I had an interesting SQL Server 2005 problem the other day, which I figured I'd share with you all, since it was kind of hard to find the appropriate solution.

One of our databases that tops out at only 500mb had a transaction log of over 50gb. The t-log never truncated when doing a full backup (although it was supposed to), and there were no error messages about this in the events or maintenance logs. I searched through the open transactions and processes, but none of them had run for more than a few minutes nor were they associated with that database. And shrinking the t-log didn't/wouldn't help, since it was full of actual data.

I Googled quite a bit for a solution, and finally found a forum post that suggested I had to detach then reattach the database without the bad t-log file. Sure enough, that worked... and now a week later the t-log remains at just a few kilobytes.

Epilogue: in the process of reattaching the database I found that the OS said the t-log was still "in use"... The open-handles feature of Sysinternal's Process Explorer made it quick work to find the offending process. The culprit in this case was CA's XOsoft Replication, which was probably the cause of the growing transaction log in the first place. Sheesh.