There are already quite a few internet resources discussing "python set vs list", but probably the simplest while elegant way to test that is below.

First, test the speed of adding/appending to a set or a list (here, I'm mimicking the real-life application, thus the test case has an optional loop):

As we can see, set and list are comparable in the speed of adding new items, with list being slightly (~12%) faster than set.

Now, the speed of membership testing: 'x in tmp'. For this test, I've deliberately chosen an imbalance of True (1%) and False (99%) results for the test - again, mimicking the real problem I have at hand:

List is much slower for membership testing, while sets were designed to be fast for doing just that.

• Jython - Python for the Java platform, compile your python scripts into Java bytecode
• Groovy - not Python, but still a scripting language which compiles to jars

• if you don't have the python-stdeb package: sudo aptitude install python-stdeb
• pypi-install pycassa

That's it.

Refer to stdeb readme for more information. You will need that if there are dependencies - which might not be resolved automatically by stdeb.

Before stdeb, it wasn't exactly trivial to make a .deb from python module.

• Type your code in the lower pane of the window. To execute, press Ctrl+Enter. One-liners can be executed by simply pressing Enter; If you don't want them executed, press Space and then Enter.

• Use Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down to navigate between code segments you've already executed. You can write a few letters before pressing Ctrl+Up, and DreamPie will only search through code segments starting with those letters.

• Press Tab or Ctrl+Space to show a list of completions to the current expression. It will also complete file names!

• Your results are stored in variables named _0, _1, and so on.

• Type a function name and press the space key and DreamPie will automatically add parentheses for you!

Here's a simple R script to do just that. It is abundantly commented, and also contains an optional (commented out) fragment which allows the removal of more low-variance, low-intensity probesets.

Hint: click the "plain text" box header to be able to right-click the code, "Select All", and then "Copy".

Sample use:

> source("script.R")
> expr.filtered = filter_below_spikes(eset)

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Slow DoS attack with just 1 computer against a number of web servers, including Apache: slowloris. There is a solution for Apache, packaged for RedHat and also available for Debian.

Finally, there's Go programming language. The most inspiring promise to me personally is the ease of execution parallelization with language's built-in syntactic constructs. That is something highly desired. Also, I like that it is a compiled language. However, it might be 10%-20% slower than pure C. Let's see how it grows.

Development: see http://www.ruzee.com/blog/2009/01/apache-virtual-hosts-a-clean-setup-for-php-developers. This setup works very well, unless you need to create several virtual hosts every day - in which case necessary actions could be partially scripted.

Miscellaneous tools exist to ease this task. This post was inspired by redet's comparison of regexp helper tools - it could be sufficient to read only that, if you're going to try the mentioned tools yourself. Otherwise, read on.

Kodos is an easy-to-use (but powerful enough) Python tool to verify regular expressions against sample user-provided strings. Available for both Linux and Windows. Generates ready-to-use Python regexp code.

redet assumes some knowledge of REs. Unlike all the other helper tools, it has the widest code generation coverage - just go to "Tools->Save command information" to generate code (Python, Perl, C, grep - just to name a few of the 57 (!) languages/tools/editors supported). At the same time, redet does not depend on specific versions of all supported RE engines - instead, redet automatically tests for features in available versions.

visual-regexp is similar to kodos in features.

txt2regex is a regex wizard written in bash, capable of generating code for 24 languages/editors/programs (by default, these are enabled: perl, php, postgres, python, sed and vim). It is really simple and convenient, though some understanding of "groups" and "character ranges" is highly recommended.

KRegExpEditor was a part of kde3-utils, and seems to be missing from current KDE 4.3. It is similar to kodos and visual-regexp in its philosophy and features.

I would recommend using one of kodos/visual-regexp/kregexpeditor to quickly test or design your regular expression, then use redet to generate appropriate source code. As an alternative (and when working in a console), just use txt2regexp to generate the code you need.

Tools I haven't tried include regex coach and regexpviewer.

Please also see this extensive list of regular expression and pattern-matching related software.

However, version 0.16.1 is very unstable, and dies with

***MEMORY-ERROR***: screem[5527]: GSlice: assertion failed: sinfo->n_allocated > 0

As a workaround (initially suggested for the highly similar Firestarter crashes), try running screem with this command:

G_SLICE=always-malloc screem

Too bad last development version of Screem is dated March 2006.

If you happen to be developing a C/C++ program - do use mtrace and valgrind, those are huge helpers against the problems akin to that shown on the graphs.

I'm sure that you are aware of the fact that floats representation in any programming language is limited by the precision of the internal binary representations. In other words, you can never have an exact float representation - there will always be some precision associated with the float you are working with. The simplest example is the difference in precision between the float and double types in C.

Suppose I have the following code fragment:

Both result.score and input->raw_cut_off are of type float, and can have positive and negative values. When compared with the greater than or equal ( >= ) operator, it is not always that condition is true - for the precision reasons shortly mentioned above.

As I already said, there is no precision specification for equality operators in C. But it is quite simple to "invent" precision specification; e.g. if I wanted to test for equality only, I could write

In this example, I'm effectively asking for 6-digit precision for the equality comparison of floating-point values. Note, that if you replace that 0.000001 with the actual precision limit of the floating type you are using, you will be "exactly" comparing floating-point numbers - up to that type's precision, of course .

The first-most example with the >= operator can be rewritten as

where precision is exactly what it is named, e.g. precision = 0.000001.

Sources used:

• comment by Randy A. Ynchausti
• scientific programming

As a result, I'm now using Eclipse PDT with Xdebug and Xdebug Helper (Firefox extension). Now I don't understand how I used to debug my PHP programs before!

After proper configuration (I'm using local Apache, but it is also possible to debug remotely), my work flow is rather simple:

• use my web-app as usual, e.g. tweaking and testing here and there
• if something server-side goes wrong: click the XDebug helper icon in Firefox, and perform some server-request action (e.g. load a page)
• debugging is started in Eclipse PDT, where I can step through the code, set breakpoints, and examine all variables
• as soon as the problem is fixed - click the XDebug helper icon again to continue using the site normally (w/o invoking the debugger)

It takes some time to get used to, but then it's a breeze.

Some advice:

• don't use apt-get/aptitude to install Eclipse; it will be much easier both in the short and long run to use some all-in-one package from the Eclipse PDT site; all you need to do - download, extract, run!
• before actually starting to do anything, tweak the eclipse.ini file by increasing heap size from 40 MiB (default) to some larger value (I used 128MiB). If you don't do this, then at some point your debugging will become painfully sloooow, and then you'll start getting tons of "out of heap memory" errors, each one suggesting that you quit Eclipse immediately
• install XDebug with apt-get/aptitude - worked perfectly, and there's /etc/php5/conf.d/xdebug.ini not to mess with php.ini
• do read XDebug guide for PDT 2.x (I'm assuming you got the 2.x version); it should be the only document you will really need to configure everything

I only wish Eclipse was faster - that is, written not in Java but e.g. C or C++.

Although it has "bioinformatics" on the title page, this is a good and very easy to understand make intro.

Original post is here.

We are pleased to announce the release of GNAT GPL 2009, the Ada Toolset for Academic users and FLOSS developers. It introduces many new features including:

- Ability to generate byte code for the JVM

- Improved support for the .NET Framework

- Addition of the Ada-Java Interfacing Suite (AJIS) that enables native Ada code to be called from Java:
http://www.adacore.com/2008/06/17/ada-java_interfacing_suite

- Availability on the Mac OS X (64 bit) platform

- Automatic C/C++ binding generators

- Addition of the GNAT Component Collection (GNATcoll) providing new APIs that can be extended by the user community:
http://www.adacore.com/2008/06/17/gnat_component_collection

GNAT GPL 2009 comes with version 4.3.1 of the GNAT Programming Studio IDE and GNATbench 2.3, the GNAT plug-in for Eclipse.

It is available for the GNU Linux, Mac OS X (64 bit), .NET, JVM and Windows platforms.

GNAT GPL 2009 can be downloaded from the "Download" section on the new Libre website:
https://libre.adacore.com.

I wonder if the new JVM bytecode generation feature was frequently requested by Ada developers, or is just a move towards popularizing Ada as a highly capable programming language. Either way, it's good.

Hopefully, I will find time and a matching project to finally learn Ada properly - since a couple of years I believe Ada is a very good programming language. And the D language is better than C and C++ (holy war, anyone? )

I assume that the problem is caused by Google Analytics, namely the "track outgoing clicks" feature (as recalled, might be inaccurate feature name). "Track outgoing links" adds some JavaScript code to all outgoing links, and that script has tick characters like this one ' which, incidentally, are also used for delimiting the values of comment anchor tags.

To fix:

1. locate file wp-includes/comment-template.php
2. in that file, find the get_comment_author_link function (lines 140-150 in WP 2.7.1)
3. replace the line
   PLAIN TEXT
   PHP:

   1. $return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

   with

   PLAIN TEXT
   PHP:

   1. $return = '<a href="'.$url.'" rel="external nofollow" class="url">'.$author.'</a>';

This helped me and might help you.

I have found the solution at stackoverflow (see also this question).

This method worked for me, but I couldn't push my rebased repository to the gitosis. I would need to re-init the gitosis repository from my rebased, but I'm not yet prepared to do that.

There is also a slightly different method (which relies on a temporary tag instead of a temporary branch), documented in Git online manual pages; I prefer the temporary branch method.

Below is a full copy-paste of the winning answer by Charles Bailey:

# create and check out a temporary branch at the location of the bad merge
git checkout -b tmpfix

# remove the incorrectly added file
git rm somefile.orig

# commit the amended merge
git commit --amend

# go back to the master branch
git checkout master

# replant the master branch onto the corrected merge
git rebase tmpfix

# delete the temporary branch
git branch -d tmpfix

Also, in my case this thread at stackoverflow was highly useful. I start enjoying the concise and compact style of Charles Bailey :

# detach head and move to D commit
git checkout

# move HEAD to A, but leave the index and working tree as for D
git reset --soft

# Redo the D commit re-using the commit message, but now on top of A
git commit -C

# Re-apply everything from the old D onwards onto this new place
git rebase --onto HEAD master

Note: this example is for a branch of commits R--A--B--C--D--E--HEAD, where commits B & C should be removed from commit history.

Another option is to use git rebase --interactive (for the same example):

git rebase -i HEAD~5

Unfortunately, rebasing on a public (pushed out) branch has no effect for other users of the current gitosis repository.

An alternative to re-initializing gitosis repository from rebased scratch could be switching to a different (rebased) branch, and deleting the outdated master branch; but I haven't investigated if this works.

It appears that it is very easy to use ExpressionEngine's contact form (which uses Email module) to send emails to arbitrary addresses - simply put, send spam using someone's EE.

And here's why:

• recipients hidden field is passed to the client; it is encrypted, but with access to the mod.email.php code, it is a matter of several minutes to write your own email-encoding function which will produce a completely valid recipients field
• there's also XID field, which seems to be unique for each page load

Spamming algorithm is clear, so I won't elaborate. (I could have missed some session variables, though - didn't check them.)

This information is valid as of ExpressionEngine 1.6.6, but nothing in the change-logs indicates that this mechanism was modified in the newer versions of EE.

Update: I've tested, and this vulnerability does exist. The simplest prevention measure is to enable Captcha for Contact Form.

I've notified the developers.