Dusty's Diverse Domain

I am extremely proud to announce the release of my new book, Hacking Happy. I believe every geek should read this book to help them find the joy and happiness in their lives that I have in mine.

The foundations of this book started with a hospital stay, as I outlined a couple of months ago. It was on the psychiatric ward that I started learning about the skills that ultimately led to my recovery. These techniques are as learnable as any programming language. My book helps you discover them for yourself.

Hacking Happy will motivate you to find techniques that work for you to optimize the happiness levels in your life. It is not a book of ready-made solutions. It is a true hacker’s manual. It provides processes. You find the solutions for the system you are hacking: yourself. The entire book is a series of analogies (some suitable, others simply amusing) to common software and systems development situations. However, the systems presented have been scientifically proven by psychologists and psychiatrists.

I have to admit that about halfway through writing Hacking Happy, I decided not to publish it. It seemed corny and the tools I was describing appeared so obvious to me. I couldn’t see how anyone would pay to read it. Then I asked myself, “If they are so obvious, why did it take me two decades and several mental breakdowns to find them?”

So I rewrote the book. It is now the best writing and most important work I have created, yet. It is hilarious. It is motivating, moving, and inspiring. It is educational and instructive. It is essential.

Marketing is a skill I’m still trying to learn. So I’m turning to you, “the crowd” to help market it! If you don’t buy the book, at least share it. Tell your friends about it. Retweet it. Like it. Plus One it. I think “Hacking Happy” is vital reading for every coder and systems professional out there. If you don’t love yourself completely and unconditionally, buy this book.

Hacking Happy is available in print and eBook formats. I’ll be adding more links to the home page as it propagates to more retailers. As of today, you can buy the book in print from CreateSpace or Amazon.com, or download eBooks in the following formats:

• pdf
• mobi
• epub
• azw3
• Kindle

My company uses Mercurial for internal hosting. Other than that, it’s an absolutely terrific place to work.

About three quarters of my colleagues are sick of hearing the rest of us complain about Mercurial’s inadequacies. They mention tutorials like this one that simply don’t work in real life. I’ve done my research, and I have not been able to find a viable git to hg pipeline anywhere. There is a git-hg repo, but it appears to be un-maintained and not overly well documented. It’s also written in bash, so I’m not eager to take over maintenance.

Instead, I’ve been spending some of my non-working hours trying to make a python wrapper around hg-git named gitifyhg. It started out as an automated version of the hg-git tutorials, but is now expanding to provide additional support and tools.

Right now I’m following a git-svn style of workflow, where your git master branch can be synced up with the hg default branch. It seems to be working somewhat ok. I think at this point, the pain of using gitifyhg is about equal to the pain of using hg alone. Hopefully future improvements will reduce that pain, and as always, patches are most welcome!

The instructions are pretty clear and the unit tests provide a pretty good description of basic usage. Non-basic usage probably doesn’t work (yet). Here’s a tutorial of what does work:

Acme corporation uses Mercurial for all their repositories. Fred and Wilma are developing a project named AcmeAdmin together. Fred is content to use Mercurial for hosting, but Wilma is a git advocate who is going crazy with the restrictions Mercurial places on her. She decides she’s going to try gitifyhg on this new project to see how much trouble it is.

Fred starts the project by creating a Mercurial repo that will serve as the remote repo for both of them:

mkdir acmeadmin
cd acmeadmin
hg init

Fred and Wilma are doing a very strange sort of pair programming where they have separate repositories on the same machine. They are doing this so if you were reading along, you could type in the same commands they are typing and the demo would work. Rest assured that in spite of this queer practice, Fred and Wilma are hotshot programmers. So Fred now clones this remote repo and starts working. In the meantime, Wilma is browsing the gitifyhg README, so she hasn’t cloned anything yet.

cd ..
hg clone acmeadmin fredacme
cd fredacme
echo "Write Documentation" >> TODO
hg add TODO
hg commit -m "write the documentation for this project."
echo "Write Unit Tests" >>TODO
hg commit -m "unit tests are done"
hg push

Wilma’s caught up now and eager to try gitifyhg. She takes over the keyboard and clones the remote repository, which already contains Fred’s changes. Then she runs gitifyhg and verifies that a git repository exists with Fred’s two commits.

cd ..
hg clone acmeadmin wilmaacme
cd wilmaacme
gitifyhg
git log

Fred’s gone for coffee. Wilma now starts her own hacking and pushes the commits using gitifyhg.

echo "Implement code until tests pass" >>TODO
git commit -m "code implemented" -a
git hgpush

Wilma got kind of lucky here because she implemented her code on the master branch and there were no conflicts with Fred’s work. If there had been, I’m not sure what would have happened. Fred’s finished his coffee and pulls in Wilma’s change via Mercurial. He then commits some more changes.

cd ../fredacme
hg pull -u
echo "deploy" >> TODO 
hg commit -m "it's up and running"
hg push

Meanwhile, Wilma is working on a separate feature. She remembers to create a new git branch this time, which is good because she’s going to want to do some rebasing when Fred’s commit comes in.

cd ../wilmaacme
git checkout -b feature_branch
echo "new feature documentation" >> FEATURE
git add FEATURE
git commit -m "start new feature by documenting it"

Before pushing her changes, Wilma pulls to see if Fred has done anything. He has! But the hgpull merges all that into her master branch. She checks out her working branch and rebases it onto master. Then she pushes it upstream.

git hgpull
git checkout feature_branch
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge feature_branch
git hgpush

And that’s the basic workflow! I’m probably going to add an hgrebase command to take care of that checkout rebase checkout merge step, since I expect it to be common. It should probably use git rebase -i, which is probably the most amazing thing that ever happened to version control.

Like I said, this is how gitifyhg works when all goes well. When things don’t go well it’s still a bit of a mess. I’ve had to manually sync up the hg and git working directories using git reset --hard and hg update -C a couple times. Once, my hgpush ended up putting a bookmarked branch on my hg repo that I didn’t want to go public (luckily, hg push fails by default when there are multiple heads); I ended up having to use hg strip to clean it up. I’m hoping to automate or prevent some of this in the future. For now, try it out and submit patches or at least issues!

Kivy is a modern GUI platform that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android.

Kivy supports gestures, but the documentation is a as to how to use them. Reviewing the Gesture Board example provides most of the missing pieces if you’re willing to experiment. I have done these experiments and hope this article will make it easier for the next coder.

The kivy.gesture module contains two main classes, the Gesture and GestureDatabase. A Gesture represents the stroke or strokes in a gesture. It maps a sequence of (x,y) coordinates to a normalized representation and can be compared to another sequence of points to determine if the two sequences “match”. In Kivy, gestures can be encoded in base64. This provides an easy way to store and load gestures in source code.

The GestureDatabase is essentially a collection of Gesture objects. Its primary purpose is to compare a new gesture as input by the user to those stored in the GestureDatabase and return the closest matching gesture, if one exists.

Before we can recognize whether a user’s gesture is meaningful, we need some gestures to compare it to. Luckily, the gesture_board.py that ships in Kivy’s examples directory does this for us. Run python gesture_board.py from a terminal. A blank window opens up. Draw a gesture on it.

Have a look in the terminal. There is a variety of output there, but the important one is the long base64 encoded string following the words “gesture_representation:”. Copy that string into a variable in a basic Kivy app:

from kivy.app import App

down_stroke = "eNq1l91u4zYQhe/1IslNjPkfzgtkb<snip>"
square = "eNq1mEluIzcYRvd1EXsT4Z+HC6i3AXyAwG<snip>"


class TestApp(App):
    pass

TestApp().run()

Now let’s set up a quick and dirty GestureDatabase from the given strings. Normally, I’d put these as an instance variable on the App or a specific widget, but for easy illustration, I’ll just toss them into the module:

from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.widget import Widget
from kivy.graphics import Line
from kivy.gesture import Gesture, GestureDatabase

down_stroke = "eNq1l91u4zYQhe/1IslNjPkfzgtkb<snip>"
square = "eNq1mEluIzcYRvd1EXsT4Z+HC6i3AXyAwG<snip>"

gestures = GestureDatabase()
gesture = gestures.str_to_gesture(down_stroke)
gesture.name = "down_stroke"
gestures.add_gesture(gesture)
gesture = gestures.str_to_gesture(square)
gesture.name = "square"
gestures.add_gesture(gesture)

.
.
.

The next step is recording the gesture that the user makes. This requires keeping track of the touch down, move, and up events. Let’s create a new widget to handle this (Note, for clarity, I’ve omitted collision detection and error conditions):

from kivy.uix.widget import Widget
from kivy.graphics import Line


class TestWidget(Widget):

    def on_touch_down(self, touch):
        touch.ud['gesture_line'] = Line(points=(touch.x, touch.y))

    def on_touch_move(self, touch):
        touch.ud['gesture_line'].points += [touch.x, touch.y]

    def on_touch_up(self, touch):
        # compare the gestures

The final step is to implement on_touch_up to convert the stroke the user created into a gesture and compare that gesture to those in the database:

    def on_touch_up(self, touch):
        gesture = Gesture()
        gesture.add_stroke(
            zip(touch.ud['gesture_line'].points[::2],
                touch.ud['gesture_line'].points[1::2]))
        gesture.normalize()
        match = gestures.find(gesture, minscore=0.70)
        if match:
            print("{} gesture occured".format(match[1].name))
        else:
            print("No gesture recognized")

This code requires some explanation. The Line object stores it’s points in a one dimensional list, where alternate indexes represent the x and y coordinates of each point. However, add_stroke expects a list of tuples of x and y values. In code, Line stores [x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3] while add_stroke expects [(x1, y1), (x2, y2), (x3, y3)]. Hence, the rather complicated call to zip.

The gestures.find call accepts a minscore (1.0 would mean the gesture matched perfectly). It will return the gesture that matches with the maximum matching score, but only if that maximum is above minscore. 0.70 seems to be suitable for basic gestures, though I have been able to confuse a ‘square’ with a ‘circle’ in my experiments.

gestures.find returns either None or a tuple of (score, gesture). Thus, if there is a match we need to pull out the Gesture via match[1].

And there you have it: basic gesture recognition in Kivy.

Unfortunately, the touch events are gobbled up by the gesture code, so if you have a gesture widget that contains other widgets, they won’t receive any events. I have taken a stab at creating a GestureBox widget that passes events through to child widgets. It seems to work for touch events, but deciding whether a motion event

Kivy is a modern cross-platform Python GUI toolkit that runs on mobile devices (Android and IPhone) and supports modern input events (multitouch, accelerometor). I was really skeptical at first, but I spent the weekend developing an app in Kivy, and now I’m hooked.

In the past, I have tried most of the available Python GUI toolkits (even Swing, through jython). In recent history, I’ve mostly done HTML based interfaces, partially because that’s where the money has been, but mostly because pyQT, pyGTK,wxpython, and tk are all painful to work with.

In Kivy, interfaces are defined in a language called (aptly) the Kivy Language. The best way to describe the Kivy Language is “what HTML5 wishes it was.” It is mostly just a layout language, but it also supports binding properties and events using inline Python snippets. It is indentation defined, like Python, and utilizes a minimal amount of syntax with a maximal amount of readability. It is vaguely reminiscent of CoffeeKup but cleaner, and doesn’t suffer from having to be compiled to HTML. I love how it mimics Python syntax, but also clearly separates presentation from control code.

My favourite feature of Kivy is that properties are events. You can easily hook a property on one widget to the property on another. For example, I wrote a simple demo that connects the value of a slider to the value of a progressbar:

BoxLayout:
    orientation: 'vertical'
    ProgressBar:
        id: bar
        value: 14
        max: 20
    Slider:
        id: slider
        max: 200
        value: 140
        on_value: bar.value = self.value / 10

When the value property on the slider changes (whether because the user moved the slider, or because it was adjusted programmatically in response to some other event), the on_value event is fired. This is connected to the value of the progress bar using a Python snippet.

Only a few lines of Python code are required to to get a Kivy application running once its interface has been defined in Kivy language. The Kivy Hello World example is actually overly complicated because it doesn’t actually use the Kivy language. The bare essentials, if the above file is named sample.kv is:

from kivy.app import App
class SampleApp(App): pass
SampleApp().run()

Just three lines of code. Kivy introspects the class name (convention over configuration) and automatically loads sample.kv as the interface for a class named SampleApp.

The Kivy API is very simple. In fact, my earliest impression was that it was almost amateurish. It felt like if I wanted to do anything serious with it, I’d be disappointed. It’s the kind of API I would teach a child. However, the few features of the API (basically properties, events, and graphics instructions) are extremely well thought out and well-defined. They can be combined like Lego bricks to create widgets as complicated as one could possibly wish. The fact that the library includes a ReStructured Text rendering widget is testament to that fact!

Kivy is extremely well documented. I actually found their pong tutorial exciting. Seeing how simple it was to do each step actually made me giggle out loud. The programmer’s guide and API are well presented as well. Further, if you get stuck, the developers on IRC are terrific. I felt like I was an accepted member of the team after asking only one question.

Drawbacks

It took a bit of fiddling to get Kivy to install correctly under Arch Linux. I suppose if I’d followed the instructions, all would have been well. However, I like to do all my development in a virtualenv, and there is no trivial way to track down and install all Kivy’s dependencies. This is especially compounded by the fact that pygame currently needs to be patched under Arch in order to compile.

There are instructions for packaging your Kivy app onto Android, but I wasn’t able to pull it off, yet. I’ll have to revisit it when I have more time.

I tried some sample Kivy apps in the Android market. They work just fine once they are loaded, but it takes each app several seconds to initialize on my Galaxy Nexus. Hopefully the Kivy team can reduce this load time. I don’t know if Kivy supports displaying a splash screen while stuff is loading; that would certainly enhance the usability.

Most of these issues are solvable. I’m sure the team is actively working on some of them. Kivy is a quite young project, but it is remarkably mature.

Kivy Catalog

My weekend project was the Kivy Catalog, an interactive showcase of Kivy widgets. It allows you to view the Kivy language code used to define the widgets and to edit it and see what effects your changes have. I think it will be a tremendous aid to users looking to get started with the Kivy language. Developing it certainly was for me!

I am expecting to have this code included with the Kivy distribution in the examples directory in a future release.

In December, 2010, I was admitted to my local psychiatric ward to be treated for depression. I was hours away from suicide. Luckily, my parents took my symptoms seriously and drove two and a half hours to ensure I obtained treatment that I had desperately needed for about two decades.

I have carefully guarded my mental illness from online circles. My career and reputation are built entirely on what I have done on the web. From the essays published on this blog and my books to my github commits and mailing list postings, my internet presence is carefully crafted. I am not ashamed of my mental illness, but because of the stigma against mental health patients, I chose to keep it private from prospective clients, employers, and readers.

It is now time to fight that stigma. Encouraged by publicly mentally ill figures such as Jeph Jacques, and Mathew Good, I’ve decided to place myself as a counter-example to the stereotype, rather than allowing myself to be victimized by it.

For years, I have been successful as a software developer, and more recently as an author in spite of the depression. Now that I have been treated, the effects of my illness have been minimized, and I am even better at what I do. I say this, not to distance myself from the crazy people I met on the psych ward, but so that you will see them as people with a lot of potential, people like me.

I am offended when people claim or imply that depression such as I suffer from is not as “bad” as other forms of mental illness. This allows them to interact with me as a normal person, while marginalizing people who suffer from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, or other illnesses that they consider more serious. It’s like they’re saying, “Sure, Dusty, you’re sort of normal. We’ll let you play on our team, but we won’t have anything to do with those freaks.”

Those freaks are my friends. I stand by them. Their illnesses are also treatable and they are just as capable as I am. Further, the implication that depression is not as serious as other disorders is an insult to those other friends that have not yet managed to successfully treat it.

My life in the last two years has been incredible. The changes — partially therapeutically and partially chemically induced — in my psyche have been phenomenal. I am now able to enjoy the daily aspects of life. Every day is an adventure, positive and full of hope and meaning.

Sometimes I am terrified to think that in another quantum reality, I died, tragically, almost two years ago. I generally succeed at those things I attempt. If I had attempted suicide, I wouldn’t have survived.

However, I am even more horrified that in this reality, a million people a year turn a highly treatable illness into a terminal one. I was heartbroken last summer when four prominent hockey figures took their own lives. Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s suicide hit particularly close to home. I once had an argument with someone who insisted that these million people, “had a choice.” I know otherwise. When you are that sick, you have no choices. You’ve exhausted them. Death through suicide is no more a choice than death through brain cancer. Both are illnesses in the brain. Both can be treated with varying levels of success. Both are tragic.

Neither were decisions on the part of the deceased.

About one in four of my readers will be affected by mental illness at some point in their life. I am here to tell you that you are not alone. You need not suffer alone. You can be treated, and your life will be amazing in the future. I care about you. You are incredible, you are successful. Take the steps you need to honour yourself, and don’t be too proud to obtain treatment. Mental illness is almost completely treatable. Take the steps you need to before it is too late. Like me, you are capable of enjoying every day. You just need to find it within yourself. You are loved.

This is the first time I’ve inserted myself into an exchange between bloggers I don’t know. This topic interests me and I have something to add. Most importantly, I found an alliterative title. So I thought I’d give it a go.

I first saw Calvin Spealman’s article I am worried about the future of Python. I suspect that upon reading this article, Guido got into his famous time machine to give his Pycon 2012 Keynote speech, accusing Calvin of trolling.

This article was shortly followed by Tim McNamara’s Python is doing just fine which (likely unintentionally) summarizes Guido’s talk.

Finally, Nick Coghlan came out with an extensive summary article called Python’s Future: A Global Perspective.

And now there’s me. All I want to do is push people to start supporting PyPy. The PyPy developers have worked on a variety of technologies that can be made into production-ready products that address most issues (real or imaginary) that people see with Python.

They’ve already solved speed and I suspect the next release of PyPy will solve memory. They’ve made huge but mostly incomplete progress in a lot of other areas, including the ones the above bloggers have mentioned.

Concurrency

I have had a lot of trouble dealing with parallelism in Python. Everything I have tried has either been a hack or required a hack to work with it. In my experience, the multiprocessing module does not work in large-scale production. However, it works a lot better on PyPy than it does on cPython, at least for me. The various async solutions can only use one processor and are therefore, in my opinion, no more exciting than GIL-throttled Threads.

In addition to better multiprocessing, PyPy also supports stackless extensions out of the box. And I haven’t even mentioned Armin Rigo’s mysterious Software Transactional Memory implementation.

Concurrency is a sore point in Python. There are solutions. PyPy is capable of doing those solutions better.

Web

I think it’s unfortunate that the only way to code for a web browser is to use JavaScript or a language that compiles to JavaScript. I feel there is no real reason browsers can’t support arbitrary <script type=""> tags. I discussed this last March.

With development, PyPy can support Python in the browser. The mostly-finished but untested sandboxing feature of PyPy can be adapted for in-browser execution. I know some experimenting was done on this in 2009 that proved it’s possible. We just need to take it up and make it happen.

Mobile

PyPy’s speed makes it theoretically possible to run it effectively on mobile platforms. Further, it can be compiled to arbitrary execution environments including JVM and .Net. There is no reason that with some development, PyPy couldn’t run on the Dalvik JVM. I’m sure it’s even possible to run it on iOS.

Interestingly, one of the trolls Guido mentioned in his talk was “PyPy should become the default Python implementation”. He debunked this readily by asking the audience how many people use PyPy in production. Nobody moved.

PyPy is ready for production use, but it is not widely used. I think this is largely because the primary PyPy developers are way more excited about creating new features than they are about marketing the current platform or polishing up nearly finished features like sandboxing or a Dalvik backend. They are visionaries, not finishers.

I say this with a great deal of respect. I am not calling for these guys to change their focus. What I want is for other people from the Python community to join the PyPy project as finishers. It needs people that can make sure these nearly-finished features are working, production-ready and more importantly: documented.

I’ve been meaning, for months, to become one of these people. Unfortunately, I’ve prioritized other things including my job and my upcoming book. It’s still on my radar, though, and I hope that after reading this article, you, too, are thinking about make PyPy the future of Python.

So, what can you do?

Use PyPy

PyPy is capable of being your default Python 2 interpreter for most common tasks. Use it. If it doesn’t work for a given project, get on #pypy, they will help you fix it. It’s even more exciting if you can use PyPy features that are not currently available in cPython, such as the stackless extensions.

Evangelize PyPy

Tell people how well PyPy is working for you. Write articles like this one.

Document PyPy

The PyPy website contains a lot of documentation, but it’s rather intimidating and unreadable to the uninitiated. PyPy is just Python, but it’s also much more than Python. Somebody with some writing skills needs to get in there and make it digestable.

Design PyPy

Seriously, pypy.org does not need to look like something out of 2005.

Develop PyPy

I’ve hacked on PyPy. It’s not scary. Work on features like numpy or Python 3 support that are the current developer’s focus. Better yet, work on finalizing features like sandboxing or alternative backends that are finished but not quite tested.

If you have an hour or two free this weekend, instead of writing about how Python is great or not great, or not going to continue to be great, do something with PyPy. Make it happen.