linux 2.6.21-bw

There aren’t official reiser4 patches for .20 or .21. There are quite a few branches that contain support for reiser4, but these are highly unstable. (for instance the -mm tree). Also because I wanted to give stacked git a shot, I started my own kernel tree:

One big bzip2-ed diff: bw-for-2.6.21.diff.bz2.
bzip2-ed tar with the separate patches: bw-for-2.6.21.tar.bz2.

This release contains reiser4, suspend2, the gentoo patches and a few patches to get everything working together nicely.

Virtual package for your python application

When you’ve got a big python application, you’ll usually split it up in modules. One big annoyance I’ve had is that a module inside a directory cannot (easily) import a module higher up in the tree. Eg: drawers/gtk.py cannot import state/bla.py.

This is usually solved by making the application a package. This allows for import myapp.drawers.gtk from everywhere inside your application. To make it a package though, you need to add the parent directory in the sys.path list. But unfortunately this also includes all other subdirectories of the parent directory as packages.

However, when the package module (eg: myapp) was already loaded, then the path from which myapp was loaded is used to find the submodules (eg: myapp.drawers.gtk) and sys.path isn’t looked at, at all. So, here is the trick:

import sys
import os.path

p = os.path.dirname(__file__)
sys.path.append(os.path.abspath(p+"/.."))
__import__(os.path.basename(p))
sys.path.pop()

Note that this script doesn’t work when directly executed, because the __file__ attribute is only available when loaded as a module.

Save this script as loader.py in the root of your application. import loader from the main script in your app, and you’ll be able to import modules by myapp.a.module, where myapp is the root directory name of your application.

This is How We Catch You Downloading

torrentfreak.com has acquired a document how a british company is tracking down illegal use of P2P: This is How We Catch You Downloading.

Basically they use a modified P2P client which searches for infringing content, download it and if that works and is indeed is the content then they do a whois on your IP and send a infringement notice to your ISP. The best thing is that they claim that this provides enough proof that you really are infringing.

They probably never heard about botnets.

C&C 3 on Linux

I’ve got Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars running on my Gentoo Linux installation with wine 0.9.34 by following the instructions here. I had to first install it on windows though, and copy the folder for the installer didn’t work, even with Crossover Office.

Except for (very glitchly) video and sometimes a crash everything seems to run. (Didn’t try multiplayer yet though). I had to put all quality settings to lowest, which makes me wonder whether that is my radeon X1400 being not so good as I expected or wine just being slow in emulating Direct3D.