tadhg.com

A Month of CrossFit

Tadhg — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:20:42 +0000

I started CrossFit proper, after having done three intro classes, on 01 Jun. I’ve managed to keep it going since, five days a week with Fridays and Sundays off. (I missed one Tuesday because of the first PyWebSF meetup.)

In that time, I’ve run a 5K, run a 10K, gained the ability to do overhand pullups, done some ridiculous number of burpees, and lifted serious weights for the first time in my life.

I was already more or less a CrossFit convert after my first WOD, and definitely after my first week. After a month? Even more of a convert. “Zealot” might conceivably be accurate.

I realize that in my previous posts about it I haven’t mentioned where I’m doing it: CrossFit KMSF. The atmosphere there has been great, and the instruction excellent, and I feel extremely lucky to have that available (and nearby!). The group of regulars is great, with competitiveness for the people who benefit from that and camaraderie for everyone.

Everyone’s been supportive and tolerant of me as a newbie, and (as I’ve emphasized before) the focus is on pushing people to their limits and appropriately scaling, not on driving people to attempt what is clearly beyond them.

The improvement I’ve felt in my fitness over that month has been rather significant. I’ve also done some other physical activity, such as Conditioning classes a few times a week, squash, and tennis, but I’ve done most of those things together before, and haven’t gotten anything like these results. It certainly feels to me that CrossFit is the difference.

While doing any physical activity for a month (more or less) solid is going to produce big improvements in fitness, one of the key things about CrossFit is that it doesn’t take all that much time. Many of the workouts have been finished in less than thirty minutes. Only two have taken me more than an hour. So it seems to me that the fitness return on time invested in CrossFit is rather high.

Just as I said after my first week, I recommend CrossFit to more or less anyone. If you’re lucky enough to have an affiliate nearby, I recommend trying it out. If you’re lucky enough to be sufficiently self-motivated to just follow the CrossFit.com posts on your own, I highly recommend scaling down generously until you get an idea of where you are. There are plenty of resources on that site to help you, including demonstration videos for a lot of the movements.

Here are some of the WODs that stood out for me (I’m not going to call them “favorites”…):

Sat 06 Jun: “Nicole”
As many rounds as possible in 20 minutes of:
400m run
Max rep pullups

6 rounds, 10 total kipping pullups, best kipping pullups 3, worst kipping pullups 0
This was my first exposure to one of the classic WODs.

Thu 18 Jun:
100 jumping pullups
50 15lb wall-ball shots
70 jumping pullups
35 15lb wall-ball shots
40 jumping pullups
20 15lb wall-ball shots

26m50s
This was my first time doing wall-ball shots, and they were a lot harder than I expected…

Wed 24 Jun: “Murph”
1-mile run
200 jumping pullups
200 pushups
300 squats
1-mile run

1h10m
This one was nuts. It’s somewhat infamous as a WOD. I had a pretty hard time with it, even with the pullups scaled to 2x jumping pullups. The pushups took me forever. I was happy just to get through it.

Sat 27 Jun: “Nicole”
As many rounds as possible in 20 minutes of:
400m run
Max rep pullups

7 rounds, 28 total kipping pullups, best kipping pullups 6, worst kipping pullups 3
This is the only WOD that repeated this month, and in three weeks I managed to add a round, almost triple my pullup total, and double my best number of consecutive pullups. That seems like progress.

Tue 30 Jun: “Eva”
5 rounds for time of:
800m run
30 35-pound kettlebell swings (down for me from 70.2-pound kettlebell swings)
30 pullups (60 jumping pullups in rounds 2-5, for me)

44m02s
This one was really tough. I scaled the kettlebell weight to half, and did 2x jumping pullups for the last four rounds, and it was still awful. Not quite as bad as “Murph”—although I might feel differently if I had to do real pullups for all five rounds.

Wed 01 Jul:
10K run

1h01m
I’ve never run that far before, I’m pretty sure. Great route, great weather, and it didn’t kill me—all good!

Thu 02 Jul:
Each minute, on the minute, do 10 double unders (jumping rope where the rope passes under you twice when you jump), and then do as many burpees as you can in the remainder of that minute. Keep repeating this until you get to 100 burpees.

22m47s
This one really did feel like it was going to kill me. At times I seriously wondered if I’d be able to finish, because it seemed like I could easily hit the point where it took me a full minute just to do the double unders. Before doing this WOD, I was only able to do double unders with about four normal jumps between them. During this WOD, necessity forced me to learn how to alternate one normal jump with one double under. That did help a lot. I still had to stop for a minute at around 70 burpees done, though. Also, perhaps just because it was the fourth day of CrossFit and the other days had been pretty hard, I felt worse after this one than after any of the others, even “Murph” or the 10K.

Admittedly, being slow at burpees and bad at double unders really didn’t help with this one.

I realize that I didn’t include any WODs that were purely weightlifting. That’s because my lifting technique isn’t quite to the point where I can do those, so I’ve been spending those sessions working on technique rather than doing the WODs per se. Apart from that, I think the above is a reasonable selection of the variety involved in CrossFit.

So I managed a week, and now I’ve managed a month. I intend to make it to a year—and then to just keep doing it as something that’s become simply part of my life.

Did I mention that I recommend it to more or less everyone?

Tags: CrossFit, exercise, personal

Wimbledon, Women’s Tennis, and Sexism

Tadhg — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:24:11 +0000

I commented on Sunday that I’m not as interested in women’s tennis as in men’s tennis. I’ve been wondering why the disparity is so significant at the moment, as this hasn’t always been the case for me. While that was on my mind, Wimbledon and the BBC decided to throw this into the mix:

A BBC source said: ‘It’s the Wimbledon play committee, not us who decides on the order of play. But obviously it’s advantageous to us if there are good-looking women players on Centre Court. No one has heard of many of the women now, so if they are pretty it definitely gives them an edge. Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures.’
—Emily Andrews and Colin Fernandez, “Babe, set and match: Why looks count for more than talent when Wimbledon decides which girls will play on Centre Court”, Mail Online, 29 June 2009

Huh, well, that’s to be expected from a channel trying to boost ratings, I suppose, but surely the organizers of the most revered tennis tournament in the world would have no truck with such an approach?

[L]ast night, the All England Club admitted that physical attractiveness is taken into consideration.
Spokesman Johnny Perkins said: ‘Good looks are a factor.’
—Emily Andrews and Colin Fernandez, “Babe, set and match: Why looks count for more than talent when Wimbledon decides which girls will play on Centre Court”, Mail Online, 29 June 2009

Lest you think that this is merely a line taken out of context by the Daily Mail, here are some of the women who played on Centre Court in the first week, with their seedings/rankins: Gisela Dulko (none/45th), Victoria Azarenka (7th/8th), Sorana Cirstea (28th/27th), Caroline Wozniacki (9th/9th) and Maria Kirilenko (none/59th). Those players weren’t playing any of the top five in their matches, either.

Why is this significant? First of all, it does matter which courts players are on, because conditions are different, and also because the Hawkeye system, and probably better line judges, are more likely to be present at the main courts than the outer courts. Scheduling is not done entirely on merit, and the tournaments do try to put popular players (and/or local players) on the main courts. That can be annoying at times, but it’s generally not too bad.

However, looks and popularity, while they might overlap, don’t mean the same thing here. I doubt that Kirilenko is really more popular than Safina, Dementieva, or Kuztetsova, despite being commonly considered “better-looking”. For them to come right out and say that they will put female players on better courts based on looks is simply appalling.

It’s appalling because of the double standard—I don’t see this standard being applied to the male players somehow. Granted, the sociocultural setup means that it’s less likely to come up in the same way, but that’s no excuse.

It’s appalling because of how fundamentally disrespectful it is (and would be for either gender): these players are the best in the world at their sport/profession. Court scheduling is a factor in the matches, and isn’t something completely outside match play in the way that sponsorships are—making this a rather different issue than e.g. Anna Kournikova getting better sponsorship deals than other higher-ranked players were getting. By scheduling based on looks, the message is that despite the absolutely phenomenal achievement of getting to Wimbledon, and of being one of the best one hundred (or so) tennis players in the world, the women’s skills don’t matter as much as their looks. That’s a terrible and completely reprehensible message, and one that has no place in any sport.

It’s appalling because by making looks a factor here, you’re making harsh public aesthetic judgments—how do you think Dinara Safina feels about being seeded #1 and then not scheduled to play on Centre Court when it’s clear that it’s due to the organizers think she’s not pretty enough?—in a realm where those judgments don’t belong (if they belong anywhere…).

All of the above holds true no matter what the current state of the women’s game. It’s true that I don’t think it’s in a good place, and that the loss of Justine Henin to retirement hurt it very badly, but tennis goes through periods like that (for both genders), and that’s no justification for caving to inane demands for “sex appeal”. Particularly when Wimbledon had record ticket sales this year.

Tags: feminism, sports, tennis

Python Script to Change OS X Desktop Backgrounds

Tadhg — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:42:38 +0000

OS X has built-in functionality to rotate between different desktop backgrounds, but if you have multiple monitors and want backgrounds that fit together (i.e. that have two halves, one on each monitor), you need to set that manually. I wanted a script to do this for me, selecting a pair of backgrounds for each day. I wrote one in AppleScript, but was so unimpressed by it that I decided I’d do it over in Python.

To do this, I needed the py-appscript module from the appscript project, which provides OS X bindings for Python, Ruby, and Objective-C.

Once that was installed, it wasn’t too tough to write the script I wanted:


#!/usr/bin/env python

#Relies on py-appscript from http://appscript.sourceforge.net/
from appscript import *

import datetime

weekday = datetime.date.today().weekday()

#Set the directory for the desktop backgrounds:
bg_dir = "/Users/tadhg/subversion/graphics/misc/re-echo_backgrounds/weekdays/"

#Set the images for each day of the week:
img_list = [
    {"l":"vico_road_summer_rock-left.jpg", "r":"vico_road_summer_rock-right.jpg"},
    {"l":"01852_dublindocklandsreflections_left.jpg", "r":"01852_dublindocklandsreflections_right.jpg"},
    #{"l":"mandolux-oldfs-l-1920.jpg", "r":"mandolux-oldfs-r-1440.jpg"},
    {"l":"point_lobos2_left.jpg", "r":"point_lobos2_right.jpg"},
    {"l":"mandolux-slowness-l-1920.jpg", "r":"mandolux-slowness-r-1440.jpg"},
    {"l":"foggygg-left.jpg", "r":"foggygg-right.jpg"},
    {"l":"muir_woods_river_left.jpg", "r":"muir_woods_river_right.jpg"},
    {"l":"vico_road_dart_left.jpg", "r":"vico_road_dart_right.jpg"}
]

#Convenience variables for left and right pictures:
l,r = "%s%s" % (bg_dir, img_list[weekday]["l"]), "%s%s" % (bg_dir, img_list[weekday]["r"])

#This is how to get the monitor display names:
#display_names = app("System Events").desktops.display_name.get()
#Left monitor:
app("System Events").desktops[its.display_name == "DELL 2407WFP"].picture.set(l)
#Right monitor:
app("System Events").desktops[its.display_name == "Color LCD"].picture.set(r)

The trickiest part of this was the last few lines. Getting the references to a specific desktop in the desktops array was far more difficult than I had expected—I thought first that app("System Events").desktops[0] would work, and then that app("System Events").desktops["DELL 2407WFP"] would. Neither did, and it took me quite some time, with some help from Seth, to find the bizarre its.display_name == syntax.

Tags: coding, OS X, python

Wimbledon 2009 Midpoint Notes

Tadhg — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:55:20 +0000

Halfway through, and there aren’t too many big stories that weren’t present at the start of the tournament—the big three are still Nadal’s absence, Federer’s attempt to break the Grand Slam record, and Murray’s chances of being the first British men’s player to win in 73 years.

Nadal’s nonattendance stalks the men’s draw, even this far into the tournament. As I look ahead to what might happen next week, there’s a void where Nadal would have been. The seed who was pulled up to replace him, Del Potro, is already gone, having been taken out by the only previous champion in the draw who’s not Federer: Lleyton Hewitt. That win by Hewitt is probably the biggest story so far. Hewitt next faces Radek Stepanek, and I think he’ll win that one, setting up a potential meeting with Berdych or Roddick. Hewitt-Roddick, should they both win, could be quite a match.

Of the matches I saw in week one, the best were probably Marin Cilic over Sam Querrey (4-6, 7-6 (3), 6-3, 6-7 (4), 6-4), Tommy Haas over Marin Cilic (7-5, 7-5, 1-6, 6-7 (3), 10-8), and Juan Carlos Ferrero over Fernando Gonzalez (4-6, 7-5, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4). I didn’t see all that much of Haas-Cilic, but enough to convince me it was mostly high-quality tennis.

Cilic over Querrey and Ferrero over Gonzalez had similar endings: the player who served second in the set was down four-five and got nervous, and that was it. Until that game, Querrey hadn’t dropped a point on serve in the set, and until that game, Gonzalez hadn’t faced a break point in the set and generally looked stronger. But tennis can come down to those key moments, in ways that can seem deflating and even unfair. As a spectator, I felt bad for both Querrey and Gonzalez after the final game. For Querrey, it was because he seemed the lesser player putting up a great fight against Cilic, until the last moment.

With Gonzalez it seemed that he was the stronger, better, player, but Ferrero showed tremendous will in fighting him off and doing just enough to pressure him at the key time. At four-five, thirty-all, Gonzalez missed a first serve, hit a shaky forehand into the net to go down match point, and then double-faulted to give up the game. Ferrero’s earlier work in the game set all that up, and after thirty-all he merely had to get the ball in play once to secure his place in the next round.

It still looks good for Federer to get to the final, but he might have some tough matches along the way. Assuming everything goes predictably (and that he keeps winning), in order to reach the final he would have to beat: Soderling (who won’t be feeling the pressure he felt in the French Open final), either Fernando Verdasco (Australian Open semifinalist) or Ivo Karlovic (whose game on grass is extremely frightening—he served up forty-six aces in his win over Tsonga), and then Novak Djokovic, who is still dangerous. All three of those matches are potentially very tricky.

As for Murray, his path to the final looks a little smoother to me: he should beat Wawrinka tomorrow, I don’t think either Ferrero or Gilles Simon can trouble him enough (although maybe I give them too little credit), and if Hewitt or Roddick make it to the semifinals, I don’t see them taking Murray down either. It won’t be easy, but he doesn’t have to go through anyone in the top four to make it to the final, unlike Federer.

Federer should get there, but if he and Murray were swapped in the draw I think that Federer would be almost guaranteed to make it, while Murray would have significantly more trouble.

There’s an awful lot of potentially fantastic tennis left to play. Just tomorrow, the following matches could prove extremely interesting:
Soderling-Federer
Verdasco-Karlovic
Berdych-Roddick
Hewitt-Stepanek
Andreev-Haas

I haven’t been following the women’s side as much, and it still looks like a Williams sister will take it. Jankovic going out early wasn’t a huge surprise, and the same goes for Kuznetsova. I’d love to see Ana Ivanovic give Venus Williams a shock tomorrow, but I just don’t believe it’ll happen.

Despite the difficulty of his draw, I still think Federer will roll on into the final, and then beat whoever he encounters there.

Addednum: here are the tennis blogs I’ve been reading recently:
TennisWorld
Concrete Elbow
Straight Sets (New York Times)
ESPN Tennis
Jim Courier’s blog
Down the Line!
Forty Deuce
Yellow Fuzzy balls
The Double Bagel

Tags: sports, tennis

Python Syntax Highlighting for star-light

Tadhg — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:37:13 +0000

A couple of years ago I plugged star-light, a syntax highlighter that’s entirely client-side. I’ve been happy with it, but wanted a Python mode for it. I was going to post some other code this evening, and then decided that I should just make the Python mode myself.

This led to fun with regular expressions.

I probably shouldn’t call it “fun”, though. In any case, I eventually got something that works relatively well:


@some_decorator()
def hello_world(arg, **kw):
    import pdb;
    if 1==1:
        print "Hello World"
        some_func('foo')
        some_other_func(list("string"))
    else:
        """
            No, we should never get to this condition.
            "grocer's quotes"
            Padding text.
        """
        pass
    return dict(message="Hello World printed")

I spent a lot longer on it than I would have liked, primarily due to the regular expression for multi-line comments:


var PYBLOCK_COMMENT1 = new RegExp(
    '"{3}'                  +   // opening triplet
    '('                     +   // open paren for main optional expression
    '([^"]*)'               +   // match not-" 0-inf times
    '("{1,2}[^"]+"{1,2})*'  +   // match "x1 followed by one or more not-"
                                // followed by "x1, all 0-inf times
    '([^"]*)'               +   // match not-" 0-inf times
    ')*'                    +   // close paren, make main expression optional
    '"{3}'                  +   // closing triplet
'');

If by some chance you’re using star-light, it’s relatively easy to add this mode. First, add this line to bindings.xml

Then add this line to star-light.css:


pre.python {
	behavior: url(star-python.htc) url(star-light.htc);
	-moz-binding: url(bindings.xml#star-python.htc|star-light.htc);
}

Finally, get this code and save it alongside the other modes as star-python.htc:

Tags: Blog, coding, JavaScript, python, web-development

David Foster Wallace on Tennis

Tadhg — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:51:19 +0000

The New York Times tennis blog mentioned DFW’s “String Theory” essay the other day, bringing to my attention the fact that it’s available online. I loved it when I read it in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and highly recommend it. David Foster Wallace wrote a number of truly excellent pieces on tennis, and all of them are absolutely worth reading. Here are those that I could find available online:
‘The String Theory’
‘Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes’
‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’

Unfortunately ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’ doesn’t seem to be available online. It’s not about tennis in the way the others are, but it’s a fascinating look at the mentality of high-level athletes. It’s in Consider the Lobster, which is also full of other excellent essays.

Tags: sports, tennis, writing

PyWebSF Site Update

Tadhg — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:46:01 +0000

I did some work on the PyWebSF site, so that it looks rather better than it did with the default WordPress theme. I altered a pretty good WordPress theme called Arras Theme, which I was fairly impressed with. As a reminder, the first meeting is tonight.

Tags: design, python, web-development, WordPress

Black Belt Tennis?

Tadhg — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:40:57 +0000

Jelena Janković was the number one female tennis player in the world at the start of the year, but has fallen rapidly since (like her compatriot Ana Ivanović ). Janković is now number six, while Ivanović is number twelve… but Janković seems a tad more desperate, as rumor has it that she’s considering a coaching switch to the guy behind this video:

I don’t think that can be a good sign.

Tags: sports, tennis, video

PyWebSF Logo Attempt

Tadhg — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:03:05 +0000

My brother asked me a while ago to design a logo for PyWebSF, and tonight I took a shot at it. Part of me thinks it has a certain something, and part of me thinks it’s exactly the sort of thing you get when you ask an engineer to do a designer’s job.

I created it using Inkscape, a free software vector graphics editor. I haven’t used Inkscape much before this, and was pretty impressed with it. If you think the logo sucks, I can assure you that the reason it sucks is not Inkscape.

Tags: coding, design, web-development

Nadal Not Playing Wimbledon

Tadhg — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:19:07 +0000

Three days before the tournament begins, defending champion Rafael Nadal withdraws. This isn’t too much of a surprise given that he skipped Queen’s, but it’s definitely bad news.

Like many tennis fans, I was hoping for another Federer/Nadal final, as last year’s was amazing.

I already considered Federer to be the favorite, and this doesn’t change that. According to how the seeding goes now, he’s set up to play Andy Murray in the final, which would be another matchup where Federer has poor head-to-head results. However, Federer is just different at Grand Slams, and while Nadal has beaten him at Slams rather a lot, Murray never has, and in fact went down in straight sets at the US Open. Incidentally, going into the US Open last year Murray had beaten Federer the last two times they’d played; going into this year’s Wimbledon he has a streak of four straight matches over Federer.

However, Federer is in my view a lot more likely to get to the final than Murray, just because he’s far more consistent, has a much better record on grass, and seems like he’ll be riding a lot of confidence after the French Open win. Murray has to deal with all the British hype, too.

I think that Roddick could do well, especially since he’s on the opposite side of the draw from Federer, assuming his ankle injury isn’t hampering him. I’m quite curious about how Robin Soderling, Fernando Verdasco, Fernando Gonzalez, and Juan Martin Del Potro do at it; Verdasco because I wonder if he can recover his early-season form on a faster surface, and the others because I wonder if they can build on their strong French Open results.

On the women’s side, I have a hard time seeing someone other than one of the Williams sisters winning it. Sharapova seems like she’s still struggling with her comeback a little too much, Kuznetsova hasn’t been great on grass in her career, and Safina has also been poor on grass and seems shaky. Dementieva could do well, but beating Serena or Venus seems unlikely. Ivanovic and Jankovic seem to be in free-fall, and it seems like outside of the Williams sisters it’s really unpredictable.

I don’t like grass court tennis as much as clay court tennis, but I’ll still be watching as much of this one as I can… of course, that’s true of all the Grand Slams at this point.

Tags: sports, tennis

Passwords Please

Tadhg — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:52:29 +0000

I know this has been on BoingBoing already, but it seems so ridiculous that I can’t resist posting it here too:

[The City of Bozeman]’s background check policy … states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate
(emphasis mine)
—“Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns”, Dan Boyce, montanasnewsstation.com, 18 Jun 2009

That they ask for your username is one thing, and perhaps justifiable—after all, if someone can see information about you by using that username, the information is by definition public. It seems reasonable to ask for usernames if the city is already going to perform background checks of this kind, which is probably defensible.

Asking for the passwords, however, is completely ridiculous. I can’t really believe that they do that and try to defend it. I also wonder if the people who crafted the policy really understand what it means to have the username and password, what the potential for abuse is there, and that even if the policy were reasonable and executed in good faith (which I strongly doubt) they would have to have a fairly impressive infrastructure for keeping secure the information that applicants have given up.

Writing the passwords down on the application form doesn’t really strike me as a good start.

The city attorney claims that no-one has ever removed themselves from consideration upon reaching that point, but presumably a lot of people simply won’t fill out the section required. On the other hand, there may be enough people out there who think that blithely handing over what may effectively be the keys to your digital life to employees of the City of Bozeman is a perfectly fine thing to do.

This kind of overreach is becoming more and more common. There’s already the whole drug-testing thing, which I regard as an unconscionable invasion of privacy for the vast majority of positions, and I suspect that the people who scare employers into using their services for drug-testing are going to start pushing “online profiling” tools that will require similar pieces of information to what the City of Bozeman wants.

Personally, I have no reason to worry about either a drug test or about what a potential employer would find if given my Facebook (or whatever) usernames and passwords. But I would refuse to supply them, and I’d refuse a drug test. I wish more people had that option, and that more of the labor market could meaningfully resist this kind of thing—but the larger issue of power relations between labor and employers isn’t one I’m going to explore in this post.

Tags: economics, politics, power, privacy, psychology

Random Bay Area Photo 2

Tadhg — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:26:41 +0000

I like this shot despite the various crooked lines.

Tags: photos, san-francisco

In Memoriam

Tadhg — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:56:15 +0000

My father, Edward O’Higgins, RIP. I miss him.

Tags: grief, personal

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade

Tadhg — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:44:08 +0000

Today I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8, a relatively smooth process. I ran into completely unrelated problems (hitting the process limit for my shell account) that derailed things for a while, but the WordPress upgrade itself was smooth.

I use Subversion to upgrade, first using
svn export --force http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ .
in my development environment, seeing if things look okay there, then checking in the 2.8 changes to my own repository (the only niggly part because I neglected to clean the dev environment of changes before the export, so I had to look through things to see what was part of the upgrade), backing up my live database, and then checking the changes out to the live environment. It all looks fine, and hopefully will continue to function normally.

Tags: Blog, coding, PHP, tech, web-development, WordPress

Pylons Via Apache Port Issues

Tadhg — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:42:14 +0000

I’ve been using Pylons (and, more recently, the Pylons-based TurboGears 2.0) for various projects for a while, and a few weeks ago ran into an annoying and specific problem: using Pylons via Apache made Pylons occasionally think it was running on a different port.

There’s a relatively easy answer to this, but until I was reading through TurboGears documentation, I didn’t find it.

The basic setup is this: I’m running my Pylons project on some arbitrary port, and I want to point some URL that Apache knows about from port 80 to that arbitrary port. I use a RewriteRule to do this, as follows.

Pylons development.ini:

[server:main]
use = egg:Paste#http
host = sub.server.tld
port = 12345

apache.conf:


ServerName sub.server.tld
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule  ^/(.*) http://sub.server.tld:12345/$1 [P]
DocumentRoot /path/to/pylons/project

All that does is have Apache look for incoming port 80 requests to that subdomain and then pass them to that subdomain on port 12345, which is where the Pylons app is listening.

That works just fine until, for any reason, you have your Pylons project execute a local redirect, e.g. redirect("/nextpage/"). At this point Pylons will tell the browser to go to http://sub.server.tld:12345/nextpage/, which for me caused all kinds of problems.

Embarrassingly, I couldn’t find the answer to this problem, despite looking through everything I could find about where Pylons sets its host name and port in the environment, etc.

When I was setting up TurboGears 2, however, I noticed a reference to using TurboGears behind Apache as a reverse proxy, and instructions on doing that. The RewriteRule above is essentially doing exactly that, but I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. The reverse proxy instructions included how to deal with the port issues. There were a couple of further hiccups, but I ultimately got it working.

The Apache configuration stays the same, as does the server:main section of development.ini. Change the title of the app:main section to app:pylons. Then add the following to development.ini:

[pipeline:main]
pipeline = proxy pylons

[filter:proxy]
use = egg:PasteDeploy#prefix
prefix = /
force_port:80

That’s it; pipeline tells it to run through proxy before running the pylons section (which is what used to be your app:main section), and the filter:proxy section tells it to force the port to 80.

The only other thing to remember is that now you have to run
paster setup-app development.ini#pylons
instead of
paster setup-app development.ini

(Note that this is for small or in-development projects only—if you’re going to be running anything that requires better performance, paster behind an Apache Rewrite is probably not the way to go.)

Tags: apache, coding, pylons, python, tech, web-development

PyWebSF: Meetup for SF-Area Python Web Developers

Tadhg — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:07:08 +0000

My brother is organizing what will hopefully become a regular web-centric Python meeting. The first meeting is planned for 18:00 Tue 23 Jun 2009 at the SF Public Library. I think a couple of speakers are lined up already, although I don’t have details on the talks. I’ll be there, and if you’re a Python developer with web interests, or a web developer into or curious about Python, you should attend too!

Tags: coding, python, san-francisco, tech, web-development

Erfworld Book One

Tadhg — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:24:34 +0000

I mentioned Erfworld last year, and I thought I’d plug it again now that it’s moved to its own website and the first book is finished. I remain extremely impressed with it, and am eagerly waiting for Book One to come out in print form. It starts here, and is definitely worth the read.

Book Two is slated to start in the fall, and in the interim the creators are putting up written pieces (paragraphs of text with one picture) to cover the happenings between the two books. I haven’t been so impressed with those so far, but that doesn’t take away from the strength of the comic proper.

Also, The Order of the Stick has been amazing over the past year. I’ve gone from rating it below Erfworld to considering the two about even. I can see how it would be tough for a non-gamer to get into, but it’s really got a lot more than jokes about D&D mechanics and editions.

Tags: comics, reading, reviews

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