staples.com says

While I’m trying to order something from their site:

Err.number = 424
Err.description = Object required

Pathetic!

They are there just to pick up haxor chicks

friendlier debian?

The Debian Women project was started because there have only ever been around 4-8 female Debian developers, yet there are currently around 950 developers in total—less than 1% of developers are women.

The [Debian Women] IRC channel is currently around 60-70% men, many of whom are already Debian developers. When asked about their reasons for participating, many express general interest in feminism and “women in computing” but as the project continues to grow, another reason cited is that the community that has built up around the Debian Women project is much more positive, welcoming and friendly atmosphere than other Debian fora.

Oh, you know why they are there…. geek dating! Probably done in a mature, grownup way, but still…

beware nevow's loaders.htmlfile

I’m using Nevow for a website I’m working on, it’s pretty nice. Biggest problem is that I have a many to many relationship with attributes which is hard to model in Twisted’s ROW. I could just write a property to the Row objects that have the many to many relationship so that it can pull in the right info, but I can’t figure out a clean what to get a ref to the reflector object. I’ve looked at Atop, but I’m a bit worried about the many command line utils I have written around the SQL database I’m using.

My caution to you, internet reader, is be careful you use loaders.xmlfile not loaders.htmlfile. htmlfile just doesn’t work well. I was trying to assign a data object for the whole page (it feeds data to the page title tag, and many other places, plus all other data on the page is a child of that data object), and after the second nevow:render it had lost track of the data object. Change htmlfile to xmlfile and everything works.

How to find how much space a file is really taking

Azerus the bittorrent client creates a sparse file for every file in the torrent you are downloading. I had a 52GiB torrent I only wanted 10 files from. When it got done ls -l couldn’t tell me which files had stuff in them.

After searching for a way to find out if a file makes use of the sparse file trick I discovered that it’s quite possible that any file that has nulls in it might be sparse. Oh great…

du turned out to actually show how much space on disk the file was taking. I couldn’t find anything that linked du to sparse files so… here it is.

Stupid Question

Archive:  xxx.zip
  inflating: xxx/xxx.csv
replace xxx/xxx.csv? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename:

What’s wrong with this? Why computers often ask us these questions with next to no information to figure out the answer? You’ve seen it in the Windows, Mac, whatever… It’s not going to take that long to compare the contents of both files and tell me the contents are the same. I’ve seen some questions telling me other information, last modified time and the like, no where near as needed as a file compare.