REST to LSL via Python and Comet

For those that may not know, I got a job at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. I really enjoy what I do, and I find this reduces the urge to work on recreational programming on the kinds of things that I enjoy. (It has also seemed to reduce my blog output to almost nil.)

I've had a project on the back burner for a while that involves pushing data into LSL (the Linden Scripting Language runtime that Second Life uses) over Comet.

And it works amazingly well! Of course, I just had to toss REST in there as well.

I'll release this code as open source next week. Meanwhile, here's a movie to show you what the hell I am talking about. I also like how this movie shows off the surreal aspect of collaborative programming!

My blog is growing weeds...

It's been over a year now since I posted to this blog. What happened? I got a job at Linden Lab just over a year ago. Somehow, my blogging just stopped during that time. I have been busy though, and have been using twitter recently. I'll probably start posting here again with more frequency, as I have lots of things to talk about, but until then check out my twitter:

http://twitter.com/donovanpreston

Awesome

Picked this up at Kid Robot in the Haight this weekend. It is so freaking awesome. I want more, but can't read japanese :-)

Running Ubuntu on Mac OS X

One of the first things I did when I got my MacBook is install Parallels, CPU virtualization software that lets me run Windows XP in a window on Mac OS X, so I can easily test our site with Internet Explorer. It's very fast, and very, very friendly.

Recently I was tasked with discovering whether it is possible to do non-blocking file reads and writes to a filesystem that is mounted over NFS. I tried on OS X, and I was unable to get a read to return EWOULDBLOCK. So, I decided to install Ubuntu on Parallels. I downloaded the iso, burned it to a CD, created a new virtual machine, and installed it.

Everything worked flawlessly. Ubuntu has always been incredibly high quality, and it has only gotten nicer in the year since I used it last. It's polished, beautiful, and just works. It is definitely something that I could install on my machine for my Mom with a web browser and mail reader.

Here's a screenshot:

Writing your Python REPL history to a file

Something I have often wished for is the ability to save the history of a Python interactive session to a file. I often screw around in the interpreter to figure out how I am going to implement something, and it is tedious to go through and copy/paste all the lines out of the terminal into an editor and clean it up. Luckily, I discovered there is an easier way in the readline module:

import readline
readline.write_history_file('my_history.py')

I'm sure this is going to come in handy many times.