Dag Olav Prestegarden’s Blog

Do you download movies and TV series (all legal ofc) in multi part rar archives or similar? Are you sick and tired of unraring them, wasting extra time and disk space before you can watch your favourite TV show? Look no further:

“unrar p -inul some.tv.episode.rar | mplayer -”

Unrar’s “p” command sends the output to stdout, allowing you to pipe the output to mplayer while the -inul switch disables messages, so mplayer isn’t confused about it’s input and you only get the clean video stream. Mplayer’s “-” switch is the same as playing the stream from stdin.

Happy streaming =)

So, I’ve just been reading through the changelogs for Python 3, and I think the Python devs deserves a lot of love for this release.

There are some major changes to some of the most used parts of the language, so backwards compatibility is out of the picture, but all in all I think most of these changes are for the better. A short summary of some of the majors are:

• dict.keys()/dict.items()/dict.values() and probably some other functions now returns views instead of lists.
• map() and filter() returns iterators instead of lists.
• print is completely removed and print() from 2.6 must be used. This fixes up a lot of the weird syntax with the print functions as these things are now simply passed as keyword arguments.
• List comprehensions’ syntactics and semantis have changed a bit, and best of all, their loop control variables no longer leaks into the surrounding scope! :D
• Int is now long.
• Fractions now returns floats, use 4//9 instead of 4/9 for truncated behaviour.
• Unicode! :) Finally all strings are treated as unicode which should solve a lot of silly bugs for us people having to deal with non 7-bit ASCII characters. This also includes strings that are sent to the system (e.g. opening files, running commands etc.) so it might lead to some bugs for those that do not use UTF-8 or similar as their system locale.
• Dictionary comprehensions: {k: v for k, v in stuff}. Awesome!
• Some changes in exception handling, both catching and raising (”except exception as var” etc.)
• <> no longer works as !=
• and a lot of other stuff…

For a complete overview of what’s new head over to What’s new?, and for a more complete changelog check out The changelog.

Since this blog is kind of lacking in content at the moment I thought it could need some filling out and decided to share these four awesome things that I’ve adopted into my daily life:

1. This article over at Asbjørn Fellinghaug’s blog about neat configuration options for working with python in vim, has really improved my experience developing in python. The article explains how to enable some nice auto completion with method/class information fetched from pydoc etc. The article is in norwegian, but hey… code is universal.
2. Jodal’s comic aggregator allows you to create a profile with the webcomics you follow and aggregates them on one page. Many of the comics offered are Norwegian, but the major webcomics are there so this site is definitely a resource for anyone.
3. Got API? Nice site displaying API documentation for a host of programming languages. Presentation is done in a tabbed environment with a great search function.
4. Vimperator is an addon for Mozilla Firefox that makes the browser behave like vim the text editor. Awesome if your not a die hard fan of the mouse and familiar with the commands in vim.

When my XBOX360 died with the well known red ring of death syndrome this spring I just packed it up in it’s box and put it aside. I’ve been contemplating buying a new one for some time now but never really found it worth the money since I don’t really use it for anything but gaming (which I don’t really find that much time for these days anyways).

A couple of weeks ago however, I heard about some guys selling a repair kit called the X-Clamp Fix and started reading up on it. Big fan of Team Xecuter that I am, I of course had to see if they had something similar, and after taking a look at their homepage I learned that they did.

Reading about the concept, I must admit that I didn’t really have any faith in the product. Since I’ve bought several of their products earlier, and have had nothing but good experiences I decided to give it a go anyways. I ordered the kit from the American section of Divineo, and recieved it at my doorstep in Norway a week or so later. With no real expectations I was positivly surprised when my XBOX booted right up working perfectly after the hour or so “baking” the pads as instructed.

It still remains to see if this is a permanent fix, but if I know Team Xecuter’s products as well as I think I do, the future looks bright. 250$ bucks saved, awesome!

Should it go RROD on me again I’ll post an update.

On a side note I’m also gonna recommend Arrested Development. I started watching the first season yesterday after my friend had kept talking about how awesome it is for quite some time. Now I’m well on my way with the second season and the series just keeps getting better and better. Now I just got to finish the series as soon as possible so I can get back to my school work.
Update: In january 2009 my XBOX went RROD again (and just 3 minutes after I bought Guitar Hero: World Tour). I wasn’t able to ressurect it again, so I had to buy a new one.