Stefan Arentz

This is rather serious. Consider this:

% dd if=/dev/zero of=data bs=1 count=2679
% sha256sum data
a25f4ccc56ddf88a4fb3e11baec5838c5181a496f376cdd569f8fc782f8fdcdf data

A file of 2679 zeros and its SHA-256 hash. Nothing special.
Well, not exactly .. now look at the equivalent Python code:

$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Oct 6 2006, 07:49:22)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more […]

Now that SimpleDB is out of it’s secret stealth beta I thought it was a good idea to make my Amazon Python modules available on Google Code.
I’ve written these for Polar Rose but as usual they are happy to release things like this under an open source license.
What the package contains is two things:

Command […]

I’ve bought a subscription to Python Magazine. It’s a pretty nice magazine and I enjoy reading it. It always teaches me some new tricks.
I was a little dissapointed about the Iterators, Iterables and Generators article in this month’s issue though. The author does not seem to have interpreted the Python Iterator Types documentation very well. […]

Rant.
What do Python, Perl and Ruby all have in common? They all utterly suck at multithreading.
None of these scripting languages can take advantage of modern operating systems and the threading support they have. This might not have been important when these scripting languages were invented many years ago when a 386 was state of the […]

Sometimes when you are in crazy situations you need to use crazy solutions.
Polar Rose is are a 95% Java shop. Basically everything is Java, from distributed image processing infrastructure to web sites and web services. (That five percent is some amazing C++ code to do the most difficult task of finding and analyzing faces.)
So, lately […]

I’m slowly improving my Python skills, which always goes much better when you’re on a real mission.
I’m now working on some tools to monitor PostgreSQL performance and I thought Python would be a good choice for that. One of the things I need to do is follow a log file so that I can parse […]

I’m going to make it a habit to do some nice hack in the two hours that I’m in the air when I fly home from the Warsaw office. LOT’s Embraer’s have a lot of (leg) room. specially compared to the crammed 737-400s that I usually fly with.
So to kick off this tradition I wrote […]

I just attended a talk about Python 3000 (3.0) by Guido van Rossum. At the CWI (Center for Mathematics and Information Technology) in Amsterdam. Always nice if something happens in your own town!
For me as a Python n00b it was still pretty interesting. Guido explained what the path to Python 3.0 will look like and […]

At Polar Rose we’ve been using XML-RPC for our (internal) web services. Simply because it is such a simple protocol and fairly well supported in all (scripting) languages. I’ve really been avoiding the WS-* Deathstar for a while now but I finally bit the bullet and started using SOAP again.
Last night when I was flying […]