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.

Another Jason

Another Jason

Media box: $150 for Prismiq

prismiq looks like it might work out. They have a beta linux server program. I still would like to have a quite full blown pc under the TV, but $400 vs $150?

Another downside for prismiq is no Games. With console emulators and MAME you can have a pretty vast game collection on tap.