Semi-technical thoughts

If you own a Bluetooth A2DP headset and any kind of personal computer, good chance is you tried connecting them together. Isn't it nice to watch movies and listen to music free from cluttering wires? Well, good chance is you hated that experience and if that was the reason for buying the headset, you might've even considered throwing it away (or using it only with your phone). Why do they suck so much? Everything points to the fact that it's not a hardware problem. The same headset most likely will work flawlessly paired with an android device or even the same computer under a different operating system (windows users report huge difference between, like, 8.0 and 8.1, and not in favor of the latter, surprisingly, I think only mac users report good stuff about their macbooks and beats although I didn't try it myself so they might all be faking it :) ). And most likely it's not even the drivers or other low-level stuff, android and desktop linux has mostly the same ...

Sorry, it's not a complete instruction, just a thought. It occurred to me (some time ago) that Python's virtualenv is, essentially, a simplified version of system "prefix", it has bin, lib, include, and can have more stuff when needed. If you're willing to experiment (you'll probably have to set a few additional environment variables and/or build flags but that's no big deal), you can install various other tools there up until you have a complete system with its own compiler and complete set of libraries although it's much simpler to keep using system compiler and libraries only complimenting them when needed. Granted, prefixes are nothing new, people were using /opt (and their home directory) this way since the beginning of time. But with little help of virtualenv-wrapper or pyenv you can easily switch between them and isolate environments better. Binaries and stuff installed in virtualenv would override system defaults but only when venv is activat...

I usually use Vim for my coding and all other stuff requiring text editing. There are a lot of plugins, scripts, configs, packs for Vim and a lot of them help with Python. But  so far I could not find the pack I'd love and I'm too lazy to make it on my own, so I usually throw out and re-create my whole Vim config dir once a year or so. This time I used Klen's Python Mode  and it's good judging by number of tools involved: almost all code style/syntax helpers I know (pep8, pep257, pyflakes, pylint, mccabe, and pylama to integrate them), autopep8 to help with formatting and stuff, rope for refactoring (sorry, I won't overwhelm this post with links – look for them in readme in github repo). It can more or less integrate with virtualenv and, of course, use Python syntax and identation plugins for Vim. It provides commands for almost everything but doesn't provide a lot of convenient hot-keys. Also there are no hotkeys for Django stuff: I'd like to have hotke...

What's it all about Whatever services you are running, there always a need for monitoring. You want to know that you service is down before you customers or bosses fire you :) There are a lot of open source software and hosted services for that, but services are usually featureless or costly (or both) and open source solutions are often featureless and outdated as well. But some of them are different. For some reason Shinken  doesn't get much of attention these days and I intend to fix it somehow. For those of you who don't know it yet, Shinken is monitoring software not very unlike Nagios  (and backward-compatible with it in most cases). But it's totally re-written with Python and have a lot of ready to use 'modules' and 'configuration packs'. Pros Shinken's core was divided into several separated services: arbiter, scheduler, broker, poller, etc. connected over network. It gives both better scalability and better availability. You can...