A Dirigible screencast

I'd forgotten how much fun -- but how much work! -- it is to put together a short introductory screencast for a product. Three days of my own work plus countless suggestions and improvements from Glenn, Harry and Jonathan, and here we have the result (click to view):

A big announcement from Resolver

So, I've let various hints drop over the last few months, but we did the official annoucement today: a new product from Resolver, called Dirigible (thanks to Wikipedia's "Random page" link :-). It's been in private beta for a few weeks, and we decided it was time to get the news out there about it. As to what it is... our tagline is that it is "a spreadsheet-like tool for Python grid computing". That's kind of fuzzy (and probably needs a bit of work), but what I do want to make clear is what it's not: it is not just a web-based version of Resolver One, our desktop Python spreadsheet.

Instead, it's something much more developer-focused, built from the ground up -- sharing code with Resolver One, of course, but not trying to duplicate it. To quote the official annoucement:

We took the things from Resolver One that made software developers say "wow" -- like Python-based formulae, objects in the grid, and the ability to treat a spreadsheet as a function and call it from another sheet. Then we worked out what we could make better by coding just those things as a web application backed by traditional Python -- not IronPython -- on a grid of Linux servers.

You can read more about Dirigible and how it relates to Resolver One on the company blog, or there's a more concise version on the product's own web page. If you'd like to try it out, there's a signup form on the main Dirigible page; we're keeping beta user numbers small for now, but building up as we gain confidence that we've not done anything totally stupid with regard to security or scalabity...

I think everyone at Resolver's done a great job in putting it all together -- of course, being able to share code with Resolver One helped a lot :-) And I'm sure that Dirigible's going to be a great addition to the company's product line.

"Your Support Request has been submitted to the Support Request"

I've been trying to cancel Resolver's Yahoo! Search Marketing account over the last day or so; it's not generating enough traffic to be worthwhile. The cancellation process is a little buggy.

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London Financial User Group Meeting: September 15

The next meeting of the LFPUG will be on September 15, from 19:00 - 21:00 -- location TBD. Didrik Pinte will be talking about Enthought's port of NumPy to .NET, which I'm very interested in hearing about.

More information on the LFPUG wiki page.

Bare Git repositories

We started a new project at Resolver today -- I'm pretty excited about it, and will be blogging about it soon. However, in the meantime, here's something that's half a note-to-self and half something to help people googling for help with Git problems.

We've previously been using Subversion as our main source code control system, but for more recent projects we've moved to Mercurial. When we started the new one today, we decided to try out Git for a change; I use GitHub for my personal stuff, but hadn't used it for anything involving multiple developers -- and various people had been telling us that it wasn't subject to some of the problems we'd had with Mercurial.

So we created a new Git repo on a shared directory, by creating a directory and then running git init in it. We then cloned it into a working directory on my machine, and started work. After a while, we had our first checkin ready, so we a dded the files, committed them, and then decided to push to the central repo to make sure everything worked OK. We got this error message:

remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master
remote: error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository
remote: error: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent
remote: error: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match
remote: error: the work tree to HEAD.
remote: error:
remote: error: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to
remote: error: 'ignore' or 'warn' in the remote repository to allow pushing into
remote: error: its current branch; however, this is not recommended unless you
remote: error: arranged to update its work tree to match what you pushed in some
remote: error: other way.
remote: error:
remote: error: To squelch this message and still keep the default behaviour, set
remote: error: 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to 'refuse'.

It took us a while to work out precisely what this meant, because we'd never heard of "bare" repositories before. It turns out that there are two kinds of repository in Git: bare and non-bare. A non-bare repository is the same as the ones we were used to in Mercurial; it has a bunch of working files, and a directory containing the version control information. A bare repository, by contrast, just contains the version control information -- no working files.

Now, you can (in theory) push and pull between repositories regardless of whether they are bare or not. But if you were to push to a non-bare repository, it would cause problems. Part of the SCC data that Git keeps is an index, which basically tells it what the head of the current branch looks like. Now, if you push to a non-bare repository, Git will look at the working files, compare them to the index, and see that they differ -- so it will think that the working files have changed! For example, if your push added a new file, it would notice that the working directory didn't include that file, and would conclude that it had been deleted. There's a step-by-step example here.

You can see how that could be confusing. So bare repositories exist as a way of having central repositories that a number of people can push to. If you want to transfer changes from a non-bare repository to another, the correct way is to pull from the destination rather than push from the target -- which makes some kind of sense when you think about it. In general, any repository that someone is working on is not something that should be receiving changes without their approval... on the other hand, we've not encountered problems with pushing to regular repositories with Mercurial.

Anyway, this was our first checkin, so we had no history to lose, we fixed the problem by creating a new central repository using git --bare init in a new directory on the shared drive, cloning it to a new working repo, copying our files over from the old working repo to the new one, committing, and pushing back to the bare repository. It worked just fine. If we'd done multiple checkins before we tried our first push, we could have saved things by hand-editing the central repository; it had no working files (because we'd only just created it) so we could have moved the contents of the .git directory up to the repository's root, and deleted .git -- this would have "bared" it so that we could have pushed from our working repo. That would have been a bit scary, though.

Running Resolver One on Mono for Windows

Mono is an open source version of the .NET framework; it allows you to run .NET applications not just on Windows but on Linux and the Mac. I've spent quite some time over the last week getting our Python spreadsheet, Resolver One, to run on the Windows version, and thought it would be worth sharing some experiences.

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An odd crontab problem

This took a little while to work out, so it's worth sharing here just in case anyone else has the same problems and is googling for solutions. We had a problem on one of our web servers at Resolver which manifested itself in some (but not all) cron jobs being run twice, which was causing all kinds of problems. Here's how we tracked it down and solved it.

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Generating political news using NLTK

It's election week here in the UK; on Thursday, we'll be going to the polls to choose our next government. At Resolver Systems, thanks to energy and inventiveness of our PR guys over at Chameleon, we've been doing a bunch of things related to this, including some analysis for the New Statesman that required us to index vast quantities of tweets and newspaper articles.

Last week I was looking at the results of this indexing, and was reminded of the fun I had playing with NLTK back in February. NLTK is the Python Natural Language Toolkit; as you'd expect, it has a lot of clever stuff for parsing and interpreting text. More unexpectedly (at least for me), it has the ability to take some input text, analyse it, and then generate more text in the same style. Here's something based on the Book of Genesis:

In the selfsame day entered Noah , and asses , flocks , and Maachah . And Joseph said unto him , Abrah and he asses , and told all these things are against me . And Jacob told Rachel that he hearkened not unto you . And Sarah said , I had seen the face of the air ; for he hath broken my covenant between God and every thing that creepeth upon the man : And Eber lived after he begat Salah four hundred and thirty years , and took of every sort shalt thou be come thither .

It was the work of a moment to knock together some code that would read in all of the newspaper articles that we'd tagged as being about a particular subject, run them through a Beautiful Soup-based parser to pull out the article text, and feed that into NLTK, then to dump the results into a Wordpress blog (after a little manual polishing for readability).

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Regular expressions and Resolver One column-level formulae

Recently at Resolver we've been doing a bit of analysis of the way people, parties and topics are mentioned on Twitter and in the traditional media in the run-up to the UK's next national election, on behalf of the New Statesman.

We've been collecting data, including millions of tweets and indexes to newspaper articles, in a MySQL database, using Django as an ORM-mapping tool -- sometime in the future I'll describe the system in a little more depth. However, from our perspective the most interesting thing about it is how we're doing the analysis -- in, of course, Resolver One.

Here's one little trick I've picked up; using regular expressions in column-level formulae as a way of parsing the output of MySQL queries.

Let's take a simple example. Imagine you have queried the database for the number of tweets per day about the Digital Economy Bill (or Act). It might look like this:

+------------+----------+
| Date       | count(*) |
+------------+----------+
| 2010-03-30 |       99 |
| 2010-03-31 |       30 |
| 2010-04-01 |       19 |
| 2010-04-02 |       12 |
| 2010-04-03 |        2 |
| 2010-04-04 |       13 |
| 2010-04-05 |       30 |
| 2010-04-06 |      958 |
| 2010-04-07 |     1629 |
| 2010-04-08 |     1961 |
| 2010-04-09 |     4038 |
| 2010-04-10 |     2584 |
| 2010-04-11 |     1940 |
| 2010-04-12 |     3333 |
| 2010-04-13 |     2421 |
| 2010-04-14 |     1319 |
| 2010-04-15 |     1387 |
| 2010-04-16 |     3194 |
| 2010-04-17 |      860 |
| 2010-04-18 |      551 |
| 2010-04-19 |      859 |
| 2010-04-20 |      685 |
| 2010-04-21 |      528 |
| 2010-04-22 |      631 |
| 2010-04-23 |      591 |
| 2010-04-24 |      320 |
| 2010-04-25 |      363 |
| 2010-04-26 |      232 |
+------------+----------+

Now, imagine you want to get these numbers into Resolver One, and because it's a one-off job, you don't want to go to all the hassle of getting an ODBC connection working all the way to the DB server. So, first step: copy from your PuTTY window, and second step, paste it into Resolver One:

Right. Now, the top three rows are obviously useless, so let's get rid of them:

Now we need to pick apart things like | 2010-03-30 | 99 | and turn them into separate columns. The first step is to import the Python regular expression library:

...and the next, to use it in a column-level formula in column B:

Now that we've parsed the data, we can use it in further column-level formulae to get the dates:

...and the numbers:

Finally, let's pick out the top 5 dates for tweets on this subject; we create a list

...sort it by the number of tweets in each day...

...reverse it to get the ones with the largest numbers of tweets...

...and then use the "Unpack" command (control-shift-enter) to put the first five elements into separate cells.

Now, once we've done this once, it's easy to use for other data; for example, we might want to find the fives days when Nick Clegg was mentioned most on Twitter. We just copy the same kind of numbers from MySQL, paste them into column A, and the list will automatically update:

So, a nice simple technique to create a reusable spreadsheet that parses tabular data.

An aside: SEO for restaurants

The other day, we got an ad through our letterbox for a new Thai restaurant. We'd become fed up with the other neighbourhood Thais, so decided to try this one this evening. We could remember the name, "Cafe de Thai", and the street, All Saints Road, but no more, but hey, no problem: let's Google it!

The results were odd; I won't link to them because they'll change rapidly enough, but what we found was that the front page results had two links to aggregators of celebrity Twitter accounts (because someone who is apparently semi-famous tweeted about the place), but everything else was about other places on the same street, or with vaguely similar names. By contrast, a search for their competitors came up with a bunch of random London restaurant listing sites, many of which I'd never heard of -- but all of which had the information I was looking for, to wit the telephone number and the precise address.

What's interesting to me is that (a) neither restaurant's own web page was on the first page of the listings, and (b) this didn't matter. All that mattered was that the contact details were at the front of the list; the more established place had loads of listings sites giving contact details for them, but the newer place was nowhere to be found. So perhaps, while software companies spend money to make as sure as possible that their own website is at the top of the search results for their name and industry segment, SEO for restaurants is much more nuanced: you don't need your own website to come first, just that of a decent listings site. Ideally, one would assume, a listings site where you get a good rating...

Anyway, just in case anyone has wound up on this page looking for details of the restaurant:

Cafe de Thai
29 All Saints Road
London
020 7243 3001

I recommend the scallops and the weeping tiger; Lola liked her dim sum and red curry with prawns. Alan Carr recommends the green curry, apparently...