rlazo's blog

Today begins Summer of Code!, I'm as excited as a little boy on a candy store :). All this time I'll been reading the code of SCIRE (my project) and learning python of course. The more I learn about this language the lest code I need write to achieve the same results.

My focus on the SCIRE project will be working on the job subsystem. How to distribute, manage and schedule jobs to the network. My first task was to code a class to process the data of a Cron-like string, because we will use it to specify when and how often a job should be deployed. Given the string, a date and a expiration time (in minutes) the class will be able to calcultate when will be the next "run", when was the last and if the entry has "expired". Not to hard... I thought, but I was wrong. I have to rewrite it twice and finally the result is a "working" spaghetti of code. I'm sure there must be a easier way to do it, sadly I haven't found it yet. If you want to take a look at the code get it here. Any comment will be more than appreciated.

But something I really learned was the value of test-cases. As kai said on his blog, it served me well. I used the doctest module and I can tell you that it can't get easier to use. Another good reason to be a python fan :)

It was early on the afternoon, after a good lunch of "torrejitas" I was hopping to make some space on my /home partition so I bought some blank media to burn the FreeBSD6.2 iso and the GentooLinuxLiveCD 2007.0 iso I recently downloaded. My machine comes with windows xp installed and nero, so I tried to use it to burn my .iso (don't throw rocks at me folks).

I say *tried* because first of all the driver didn't recognice my media as blank media so it only showed me the image recorder drive. I remembered that a pop-up (God bless the guy who invented pop-ups) saying that I need to download the nero burning rights plugin... I didn't get it but what could I lose? So I downloaded the package, installed it and then rebooted and voila.. the BIOS didn't detected my drive. WTF!? is that even possible?

Seems like it is... I tried to fix it using the BIOS setup interface... nothing happens. So I decided to open the box and see if I can do something with the bare metal. I remember that someone told me that this issues may be fixed taking out the battery of the mainboard. I wanted to try something else before. So I taked to drive out, change the jumper from auto to what I thought was Slave and rebooted... And my drive was back!

Funny thing, it used to be detected as hda, but now is hdb... Someday I would find why but right now I'm just happy with my two images burned :)