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How to have shared state between different instance of a class without a singleton pattern.

The ‘Singleton’ DP is all about ensuring that just one instance of a certain class is ever created. It has a catchy name and is thus enormously popular, but it’s NOT a good idea – it displays different sorts of problems in different object-models. What we should really WANT, typically, is to let as many instances be created as necessary, BUT all with shared state. Who cares about identity – it’s state (and behavior) we care about!

By Alex Martelli at Singleton? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Singleton: The Borg Design Pattern.

I lost an hour of my life today trying to figure out why Sphinx would not document a class inside a module specified by :automodule:.

I learnt two things today.

This might be a very esoteric topic for most people, but since I could not find information about this anywhere, I decided to document this in a post.

Here is the problem. I use Jira at work, and today, I needed to close a bunch of tickets based on a search result. Now, searching or doing batch operations is simple enough from the browser, but a small detail made the exercise impossible via the web UI.

The first 5km of a 100km cycle only superhighway has opened to public in Germany. When complete, the route will connect 10 western cities including Duisburg, Bochum, and Hamm, and four universities. Martin Toennes of regional development group RVR says almost two million people live within 1.2 miles of the bicycle highway and will be able to use sections of it for their daily commutes. With the rise in popularity of electric bicycles to help with undulating terrain, RVR says the bike way, which utilizes mostly abandoned railroad tracks in the Ruhr Valley, could replace up to 50,000 motor vehicles during daily commuting hours.

It seems every generation has its own bouquet of diets that people swear by.

In the early 80s, diet guru Nathan Pritikin believed that we should shun all fats and food containing cholesterol. He died of leukemia in ’85, but apparently his autopsy revealed that he had “arteries like those of a child and a heart like that of a young man”.

His arch rival in the time, Robert Atkins, of the Atkin’s Diet fame, espoused just the opposite - low-carb, high fat diets. His controversial death threw up allegations of a life long history of cardiac issues and obesity. But still there are people around who swear about it.

Loads of new diets have sprung up in recent years, with a loud number of them blaming carbs, sugar, starches and other GI (glycaemic index) manipulating food groups to be the cause of diet issues in the population.

Now a new article goes a bit deeper. It follows the published “study from an Israeli team led by Eran Segal”, to suggest that looking at all carbs the same way and avoiding them is too simplistic an approach. Human body is too complex and different sources of carbs affect different people in different ways. One of the major reason that they pointed out was the difference in the profile of the microbes in our digestive system!

In a welcome move, the Indian patent office has temporarily stopped issuing software patents. "In view of several representations received regarding interpretation and scope of section 3(k) of the Patents Act 1970 (as amended), the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions... are kept in abeyance till discussions with stakeholders are completed and contentious issues are resolved," the Controller General of Patents said in a notification issued last week. Again, this is a temporary measure and given the intensive lobbying that happens behind doors, it could still be revised.

The Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) has finally created a standard for when a page has been taken down due to legal reasons. The new status code, 451, indicates that a host has received a legal demand to deny access to a resource. Via TheNextWeb

It seems every year I change my blog backend, hoping it will make a difference to the frequency in blogging. After 10+ years blogging, I am older and wiser enough to know that it doesn’t. It is a losing battle. Content I would like to share with my family goes to Facebook, random quips go to Twitter. Pretty much wherever there is a more suitable audience. In any case, writing or not, it is much better to move to a hosted solution, and I moved my domain and migrated my Jekyll website (painfully) to the wordpress.

It is impossible to ignore avro at work - it is the data serialization format of choice at work (and rightly so), whether it is to store data into Kafka or into our document database Espresso. Recently, I had the need to read avro data serialized by a Java application, and I looked into how I might use Python to read such data.

Having worked with Python for a while, I am trying to pick up Ruby, especially for some of my work with logstash. While trying out a small program in Ruby, I got stumped with a peculiar trait of Ruby hashes with default values. It made me lose an hour of my life I am not going to get back. :(