MV Sun Sea in Esquimalt

flickr — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 03:08:02 +0000

The migrant/refugee vessel MV Sun Sea arrived in Esquimalt Harbour on Friday.

Python 2.7 on Dreamhost

kelvin.wong — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:49:43 +0000

Python 2.7 was released on 3 July 2010 and I wanted to use it on my Dreamhost account, but the usual installation method yields some warnings:

Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
_bsddb             _tkinter           bsddb185
bz2                dl                 imageop         sunaudiodev
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.

Three of these modules cannot be installed on Dreamhost’s 64-bit Debian servers anyway and one of them is an older version of a module I am going to install:

bsddb185: Older version of Oracle Berkeley DB. Undocumented. Install version 4.8 instead.
dl: For 32-bit machines. Deprecated. Use ctypes instead.
imageop: For 32-bit machines. Deprecated. Use PIL instead.
sunaudiodev: For Sun hardware. Deprecated.

Now, if you don’t need any of those remaining modules, then you should be able to just complete the installation and be done with it. If you want all the modules that you can get, you are in for some extra building. This post does a good job of explaining the installation of Python 2.6; mine is based on it. Let’s put the files in the following directories:

Python 2.7: $HOME/local/Python-2.7
Berkeley DB 4.8: $HOME/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8
Other executables: $HOME/local/bin
Header files: $HOME/local/include
Libraries: $HOME/local/lib
Temporary artifacts: $HOME/temp

We’ll need to push these values into the UNIX environment by using the export tool under the default bash shell:

$ export LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/local/lib -L$HOME/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/lib"
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I$HOME/local/include -I$HOME/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/include"
$ export CXXFLAGS=$CPPFLAGS
$ export CFLAGS=$CPPFLAGS
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/local/lib:$HOME/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/lib
$ export LD_RUN_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Next make the directories:

$ mkdir ~/temp ~/local

It’s also a good idea to check your machine (note the “x86_64” token). It should look similar to this:

$ uname -a
Linux machine 2.6.32.8-grsec-2.1.14-modsign-xeon-64 #2 SMP Sat Mar 13 00:42:43 PST 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: x86_64-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Debian 4.3.2-1.1' --with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.3/README.Bugs --enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib --without-included-gettext --enable-threads=posix --enable-nls --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.3 --program-suffix=-4.3 --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-libstdcxx-debug --enable-objc-gc --enable-mpfr --enable-cld --enable-checking=release --build=x86_64-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.3.2 (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) 
$

Berkeley DB will be hooked into the installed TCL, so you should install TCL before you install Berkeley DB. Install Python last. Other than that, I don’t believe that order of installation should matter. Let’s do it!

TCL/TK

The warning “_tkinter” indicates that the _tkinter module was not built. You will need to build both TCL and TK:

$ cd ~/temp
$ pwd
/home/username/temp
$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tcl/tcl8.5.8-src.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf tcl8.5.8-src.tar.gz
$ cd tcl8.5.8/unix
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
$ make
$ make install
$ cd ../..
$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tcl/tk8.5.8-src.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf tk8.5.8-src.tar.gz
$ cd tk8.5.8/unix
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
$ make
$ make install
$ cd ../..

Berkeley DB 4.8

The warning “_bsddb” will go away when you install version 4.8 of the Oracle Berkeley DB:

$ cd ~/temp
$ wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.8.30.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf db-4.8.30.tar.gz
$ cd db-4.8.30/build_unix
$ ../dist/configure --prefix=$HOME/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8 --enable-tcl --with-tcl=$HOME/local/lib
$ make
$ make install
$ cd ../..

BZip2

Dreamhost has an earlier version of BZip2 (version 1.0.4) and no library (at least I couldn’t find one). To get the latest version:

$ cd ~/temp
$ wget http://www.bzip.org/1.0.5/bzip2-1.0.5.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf bzip2-1.0.5.tar.gz
$ cd bzip2-1.0.5
$ make -f Makefile-libbz2_so
$ make
$ make install PREFIX=$HOME/local
$ cp ./libbz2.so.1.0.4 $HOME/local/lib
$ ln -s $HOME/local/lib/libbz2.so.1.0.4 $HOME/local/lib/libbz2.so.1.0
$ cd ..

Python 2.7

You should be able to build and install Python 2.7 now, less the modules that either cannot be built on a 64-bit platform or cannot coexist with a contemporary version.

$ cd ~/temp
$ wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7/Python-2.7.tgz
$ tar zxvf Python-2.7.tgz
$ cd Python-2.7
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/Python-2.7
$ make
$ make install

At the end of the make process, you will see this:

Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
bsddb185           dl                 imageop
sunaudiodev
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.

As mentioned earlier, these modules are either not buildable on Dreamhost’s 64-bit machines or not compatible with the newer version of Berkeley DB.

Hooking up the new Python

You want to put the new Python 2.7 on your PATH so that bash executes it before the systemwide Python 2.5. If you don’t want to append these export statements, you can also do it via a text editor (vim, emacs, etc).

$ cd ~
$ echo "export PATH=\"$HOME/local/bin:\$PATH\"" >> .bashrc
$ echo "export PATH=\"$HOME/local/Python-2.7/bin:\$PATH\"" >> .bashrc
$ source .bashrc
$ which python
/home/username/local/Python-2.7/bin/python
$ python -V
Python 2.7

Try it out!

Try out your new modules…at the shell prompt type “python”!

>>> import bsddb
>>> db = bsddb.btopen('/tmp/spam.db', 'c')
>>> for i in range(10): db['%d'%i] = '%d'% (i*i)
...
>>> db['3']
'9'
>>> db.keys()
['0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9']
>>> db.sync()
>>> db.isOpen()
True
>>> import bz2
>>> print bz2.__author__
The bz2 python module was written by:
 
    Gustavo Niemeyer <niemeyer@conectiva.com>
 
>>> import Tkinter
>>> Tkinter.__version__
'$Revision: 81008 $'
>>>

Shock the monkey!

kelvin.wong — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:36:45 +0000

Some important research from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Drs. Tsai, Chang, Liu, Kuo, Chen, Jaw, & Hsieh (whew…seven researchers) published a study of the electrical properties of the Ding-Dong. No, not that Ding-Dong, the other ding-dong.

Anyway, you can read the shocking news on Disco blog or the abstract on PubMed. This is going to win them seven awards.

USCYBERCOM: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a in Python

kelvin.wong — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 04:53:27 +0000

In Wired, Noah Shachtman pointed out that the US Cyber Command logo has a 32-character code inscribed onto its inner gold ring. It is well-known that MD5 produces 128-bit message digests (often represented as 32-character hexadecimal digests) so it surprised few that the code turned out to be an MD5 hash of the organization’s mission statement.

To recreate this hash in Python, type the following into your Python interpreter:

Python 2.5.4 (r254:67917, Dec 23 2008, 14:57:27) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5363)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from hashlib import md5
>>> ms = "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."
>>> o = md5(ms).hexdigest()
>>> print o
9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
>>> len(o)
32
>>>

Note: The library ‘hashlib’ was added in Python 2.5.

Funniest release notes ever? Thank Chaos Tools for Drupal

kelvin.wong — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:49:14 +0000

From the Chaos Tools release notes for version 1.6 for Drupal 6:

The 1.5 release was botched: only some of the changes listed on the release notes were actually included. This release (1.6) includes all changes that were supposed to be in 1.5.

See for yourself and feel your confidence in the codebase rise with each word.

Bongo's Codeways