I've just run into a weird bug on my Gentoo box. After some recent update the grave key stopped working. It did produce tildes when pressed with shift, but without a modifier it produced no output. Analysis with xev showed that the key was recognized as Zenkaku_Hankaku. Some more research revealed that it was due to this line in /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev and /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86:

I'm back from RuPy 2009 in Poznań. The conference was really good, much better than I anticipated. Unfortunately some talks that seemed interesting were cancelled.

Just a couple of days ago I've run into a tricky bug with nginx. One of the virtual servers defined a variable in its configuration (via set keyword). When creating a new virtual host by copying the site file I've removed the set line, but not the usage (fastcgi_param line). This caused a random sequence of bytes to be put into that variable. PHP serving those FCGI requests handled it gracefully, but I spent quite a long time trying to figure out why this variable was garbled.

I've released yet another toy project: an attempt to create a PHP ORM. It is hosted on BitBucket

TwillManager is a side project created at our company (Code Sprinters), written in Python (with CherryPy, Mako, sqlite - and, of course, Twill - scripted headless web browser).

Two interesting posts (rants?) about current status of Computer Science in the academic world: Why I am Not a Professor and What's wrong with CS research. I have to agree with most points in the first one (while not with the second one).

Yet another small piece of code: implementation of simple route mechanism in PHP: Bitbucket repository.

Yet another post not related to programming (I'll try to post something about programming soon).

W krótkiej przerwie w pisaniu pracy magisterskiej...

I've just had to add a primitive captcha to this blog. Turns out that even though only a few people read it spambots try to add advertising comments to the articles. Hope this fixes the problem - if not I'll have to add ReCaptcha here.

As mentioned in the first post and on my old Wordpress blog I'm doing some research into web applications for my thesis — and in the process I'm writing my own framework. Well, the part that is not related to my thesis (dealing with continuations) was just made public. You can read the API documentation and download it from http://squarewheel.pl/onion/.

“Be strict with what you generate, be permissive with what you accept” is a quite popular opinion when it comes to input/output from libraries, network protocols etc. But is it such a good idea? Because of it we are stuck with web as it is now, with bad markup everywhere – because it works (mostly). And yet even more problems arise.

Documentation of various linux programs often states that after adding user to some unix group you need to re-login in order to use new privileges. Although this is definitely the easiest option, it is still possible to enhance user's groupset without re-logging.

HTML helpers are simple functions, that generate HTML fragments. They were made popular by Ruby on Rails (eg. link_to helper). Similarly they were adopted in Pylons as Webhelpers.

As Alberto pointed out in one of the posts on my old wordpress blog, my sliding_sessions plugin will not work with Rails 2.3.

Just had a minor "WTF" moment with MySQL, related to collation. It turns out that in the default unicode collation (utf8_general_ci) accents are ignored (but not all of them). Yes, I should have checked in the documentation.

The "Square Wheel blog", previously available at Wordpress has moved to a new site – http://squarewheel.pl