Laptop screen backlight brightness adjustment

Well I have to admit that not all of my Asus UL80V function keys work on Linux. Among them are the brightness adjustment buttons. Well it's not a problem to adjust the brightness on linux anyway, I remember there was a possibility to set it manually in:

/proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness

Sadly I failed to find the file on my current distribution (Mint 13 / Maya, based on Ubuntu 12). I made some research and searching and managed to locate another file responsible for the backlight brightness setting:

/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness

The brightness may be set the following way:

sudo echo "15" > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness 

This works, but is a little bit inconvenient. Now I need to find a way do bind this with the brightness increase/decrease buttons, which may be tricky since they don't appear in /dev/input/ events (or at least I haven't found a suitable event yet).

Cheers!
KR 

Generic django forms

My last post presented a way of generating dynamic classes in python. Today I would like to present a way of applying this mechanism to Django forms, making them a bit generic. An example may be a login form, that may be used with an "accept regulations" checkbox or without it, depending on the context.

class LoginForm(forms.Form):
    username = forms.CharField(max_length=20, label="Username")
    password = forms.CharField(widget=forms.\
            PasswordInput(render_value=False),max_length=20, label="Password")

    def clean(self):
        #form validation/clean implementation
        pass

This a simplest login form you can get, all there is to do is to implement a login mechanism (or simply use it, it's available at the django.contrib.auth module). Both provided fields are required, so the is_valid method will generate an appropriate result. Now let's make a possibility to generate this form with an "accept regulations" which is also required.

class LoginForm(forms.Form):
    username = forms.CharField(max_length=20, label="Username")
    password = forms.CharField(widget=forms.\
            PasswordInput(render_value=False),max_length=20, label="Password")


    def clean(self):
        #form validation/clean implementation
        pass


    @classmethod
    def with_accept_regulations(cls):
        return type(
            "%sWithAcceptRegulations" % cls.__name__,
            (cls,),
            {"accept_regulations" : forms.BooleanField(required=True, \
                    label="I accept the regulations")},

Now we may easily obtain a login form with accept regulations using the with_accept_regulations class method. Example usage is presented below:

if something:
    CurrentLoginForm = LoginForm
else:
    CurrentLoginForm = LoginForm.with_accept_regulations()


form = CurrentLoginForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
    #and os on...
    pass

This example is trivial, and a similar outcome may be achieved by using simpler mechanisms, however examples are suppose to be simple. This method may be applied to more demanding applications, a huge feature is the ability to chain class creation methods, for example you could try implementing the following:

LoginForm.with_accept_regulations().with_skin_selection(), which would generate a class LoginFormWithAcceptRegulationsWithSkinSelection. I know this is starting to look like java, but the long names are meant to be descriptive :-)



Have fun exploring new possibilities.

Cheers!
KR

P.S.
I was in a hurry, so the code may have some simple mistakes - beware :-)

Dynamic type creation in python

Long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, before python 2.2+ was invented, classes and types were very different. Finally an update came and unified them. Nowadays those statements mean pretty much the same (python 2.7 / 3.X), so by stating "dynamic type creation" we actually mean "dynamic class creation" (not the other way round - this way it looks more OOP). There is a magic keyword type, which returns a type(class) of an object.

>>> class Test(object):
...     pass
...
>>> inst = Test()
>>> type(inst)
<class '__main__.Test'>




This seams logic, however the type function may be also used for dynamic class creation. We have to provide a new class name, a list of base classes and some additional attributes. For example we want to create a new class that extends Test.

>>> Test2 = type("Test2", (Test,), {"my_func" : lambda self: "Hello"})
>>> Test2
<class '__main__.Test2'>
>>> Test2.__dict__
dict_proxy({'my_func': <function <lambda> at 0x12126e0>, '__module__': '__main__', '__doc__': None})
>>> inst2 = Test2()
>>> inst2.my_func()
'Hello'

This mechanism may not be so spectacular before you apply it with a sophisticated library/framework, tomorrow I'll present how to use it with django forms.

Cheers!

KR

Using table join with mysqldump

Everybody familiar with MySQL database knows mysqldump, the ultimate MySQL backup tool. This tool has more intereseting features, mainly it can be used to dump only specific tables or even selectively extract data from the database.

So if You want to dump a single table, you should execute:

mysqldump -u db_user -p db_name table_name > table_and_data.sql

This is a default script, quite useful for recreating tables/making backups. But as it was mentioned before, we just want the data. Fortunately mysqldump comes with many options, --no_create_info for instance will drum only the data wrapped by an INSERT INTO statement. Another nice option: --where enables providing custom data filtering rules (typical for MySQL). Let's try a query that dumps specific rows from a table that is related to another table using a WHERE statement on the corresponding data model.

mysqldump -u db_user -p db_name table_name --no_create_info \
--lock-all-tables --where 'id in (select tn.id from table_name as tn \
join related_table as rt on tn.related_table_id = rt.id \
where rt.some_field = 1)' > data.sql

The idea is to use a subselect to get table_name rows that have foreign keys to the related_table rows that meet the rt.some_field = 1 requirement.  This works well, however if You access tables not specified in mysqldump's command params, You should lock them yourself. In this example I use --lock-all-tables which is an overkill (if You're using a transactional database engine, such as InnoDB, You can use --single-transaction instead - no table locking will be required).

Cheers!
~KR

Mercurial disallow pushing multiple heads

So why are multiple heads evil, and why do we want to stop hg from pushing them to another repo. Well, usually multiple heads are caused by failed merge attempts (avoiding merges). Pushing multiple heads in this situation will postpone the need of merging (it will be needed eventually), or make somebody else merge the heads. If a programmer intends to make a new head in the first place - he is likely to create a new branch.

Another reason do want to push multiple head changesets are auto build/test frameworks. If the execute hg incoming and suddenly see 3 heads instead of one. Surely they'll fail to carry on their routine.

I believe I've mentioned something about mercurial hooks and some of their applications. These hooks may be used to disallow pushing changesets with more than one head. We don't have to implement this hook by ourselves, a good implementation is available at hg.pythong.org.

mkdir ~/hooks && cd ~/hooks
wget http://hg.python.org/hooks/archive/fc6022656a7b.tar.gz -O hooks.tar.gz
tar zxf hooks.tar.gz && mv hooks-fc6022656a7b/* .

Now we need to edit, the ~/.hgrc file.

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.checkheads = python:/home/kr/hooks/checkheads.py:hook


Let's see how it works:

~ $ ~/prj/python/bw $ hg push
pushing to /home/kr/repos/bw
searching for changes
abort: push creates new remote head 4ffea01f3220!
(did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)

This was to be expected, by default mercurial required the -f switch to push a changeset containing multiple heads.

~ $ hg push -f
pushing to /home/kr/repos/bw
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
* You are trying to create new head(s) on 'default'!
* Please run "hg pull" and then merge at least two of:
* c96b37d67e47, 4ffea01f3220
transaction abort!
rollback completed
abort: pretxnchangegroup.checkheads hook failed

This hook gives +10 to keeping your repo tidy!

Cheers!
KR

P.S.
There are some more hooks in the downloaded archive, feel free to check them out.