Planet Jython

Frank Wierzbicki: Leaving Sauce Labs

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:30:29 +0000

My time at Sauce Labs is at an end, and so I am looking for a new opportunity. I had a great time at Sauce Labs where I worked on building a cloud based infrastructure for test automation with Selenium. I have been working in software for more than twelve years, often in a lead role. I am well regarded in the Open Source world, where I have participated in and helped build communities. I have been the Jython project lead for six years. I am a committer on the Python project, and a member of the Python Software Foundation. I have done a wide variety of work in recent history: development and leadership work in Java and Python, from parsing Python source and compiling to Java bytecodes, to coding and administrating distributed cloud based web applications. I am able to do work in any of these areas, on either a full time or consulting/contracting basis. My contact information can be found on my Google profile. My LinkedIn profile is a good summary of my credentials.

Alan Kennedy: PyCon Ireland 2010: A great success!

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:34:03 +0000

I’m delighted to report that PyCon Ireland 2010, the first ever python language conference in Ireland, was a great success! Over 100 people came, attended two dozen talks and tutorials in three tracks, and participated in sprints and open-spaces.

Our conference venue, the Dublin School of English in Temple Bar, was a great success. Their classroom layouts proved ideal for talks and tutorials. The rooms for our three tracks were all accessed from a large foyer, where our sponsors set up their tables (and beanbags!). Open spaces rooms were also close, so the amount of traffic through the foyer gave a sociable and affable atmosphere.

Local restaurateurs Botticelli’s did a great job on the daytime catering, supplying tasty food and drink, and excellent coffee: we had a dedicated coffee machine and barista all day!

Just as I’ve experienced with other python conferences, there was a significant presence from the third-level education, both researchers and students. There were computer scientists interested in python as a language for teaching (the original purpose for which python was designed). There were research groups who were either already using or learning python in order to apply it to their programming needs, for analysing and visualising data, controlling equipment, etc. Work areas of third-level conference participants included genetics, electronics, and space hardware.

The venue for Saturday evening was the very modern Radisson Blu hotel on Golden Lane. The hotel staff were very professional and helpful: they made our entire experience there seamless and relaxed. What better way to end the evening than to retire to the bar for informal chats, the odd beer and the fine artistry of 3 piece blues band, Left, Right and Centre.

For the sprints on Sunday, the most remarkable project was certainly the project to code a solution finder for the fiendish Bedlam cube puzzles that sponsors Google had brought along. The effort even continued after the sprint was over, with the crew retiring to the TOG Hackerspace to work further on it.

One very successful outcome from the conference was that there is now a Python Ireland meetup in Cork city, which will be meeting on the first Thursday of each month. With the Galway Python meetups happening on the first Wednesday of the month, and the Dublin meetups on the second Wednesday, it is clear that Python Ireland is an active and growing community. Watch this space!

Many of the presentations given and media recorded at the conference are now available: See the following links

An enormous amount of organisation goes into making an event like a python conference work, and all of the committee are delighted that their work has all been worthwhile. One person deserves very special mention, Python Ireland’s Chairman, Vicky Lee, who was dedicated, untiring and endlessly patient through the whole process and put in more work than the rest of us put together: Massive kudos to Vicky!

Looking forward to PyCon Ireland 2011!

James Abley: Apple AppStore feedback

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:00:58 +0000

This morning the AppStore on my iPod Touch pointed out that the Twitter app had an update. I installed it and launched the app to see what was new. Crash! After 5 crashes in a row without a successful launch, it was obvious that a bad build had snuck into the App Store.

 Incident Identifier: 61EE3335-1AD0-4099-8EC6-FAB4B6160A43
 CrashReporter Key:   001e29bd4aa2ef81d42701ce5325da94b364e27b
 Process:         Twitter [8470]
 Path:            /var/mobile/Applications/8E13E345-CDD3-4CA4-899D-8E38BA6661C5/Twitter.app/Twitter
 Identifier:      Twitter
 Version:         ??? (???)
 Code Type:       ARM (Native)
 Parent Process:  launchd [1]
 
 Date/Time:       2010-08-04 07:58:35.994 +0100
 OS Version:      iPhone OS 3.1.3 (7E18)
 Report Version:  104
 
 Exception Type:  EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
 Exception Codes: 0x00000001, 0xe7ffdefe
 Crashed Thread:  0
 
 Dyld Error Message:
   Symbol not found: __NSConcreteGlobalBlock
   Referenced from: /var/mobile/Applications/8E13E345-CDD3-4CA4-899D-8E38BA6661C5/Twitter.app/Twitter
   Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
   Dyld Version: 149
 
 Binary Images:
     0x1000 -   0x14ffff +Twitter armv6  <43ca857e309a61ba8c5da3ab83e42218> /var/mobile/Applications/8E13E345-CDD3-4CA4-899D-8E38BA6661C5/Twitter.app/Twitter

As an iPhone app developer, I think I know what this problem is. We saw this problem in one of our apps. IIRC, the new, preferred llvm compiler has a bug with the new blocks language construct, and gcc doesn't, and the bug only shows up at runtime, in certain environments. To fix it, Twitter are going to have to recompile and use gcc rather than llvm, and then wait for the wheels at Apple to turn.

Other people have talked about the frustration of not being able to iterate at web speed or do continuous deployment, but that's part of the ecosystem that you operate in with Apple.

Testing, either by the Twitter team, or by Apple when they review the app prior to approving it, should have caught this issue. But these things happen.

We had a similar thing happen with an update to one of our apps recently. An update went live and thanks to the apparent difficulty in doing your own testing of the binary that gets sent to Apple, an issue only became apparent when the new version was available through iTunes. To me, this is where the ecosystem is broken. If I have a webapp and I deploy an update, then find an issue (via my cluster-immune system - one day!), I roll it back.

iTunesConnect has no rollback, even though it seems like a highly desirable feature. I know in our case, we would have liked the option to rollback to the last known good version and then wait for Apple to review an update, rather than having the world upgrade to a version that we didn't want them to be running. I imagine Twitter would appreciate a similar feature right about now.