Sketches

This is a place for some software sketches. Like an artist's sketches, they may be interesting to someone even if they aren't finished.

• memdbg.c is the source for a small Python C extension that exposes mallinfo to Python. mallinfo tells you how much memory a process has allocated. It was written for the purpose of discovering how much memory Zope is really using, which can be a lot less than the process size, due to heap fragmentation. On Linux, you can build the extension using the following command:

  gcc -Wall -shared -I /usr/include/python2.3 -o memdbg.so memdbg.c

  Then, while you're in the directory containing memdbg.so, type pydoc memdbg to read about the stats() and trim() functions.

• blinkenlights.py shows you activity in Python code. The window displays one monitor light per module currently loaded in Python. Each light flashes when activity is detected in the corresponding module.
  
• GTKLife "Battle" Patch: The Game of Life with two colors. Retains the qualities of Conway's original rules while colorizing active cells with one of two colors. Lets you play against an opponent or simply watch the progression of cells. The patch was written against gtklife-4.0. See Suzanne Britton's site for more information about GTKLife.
  
• Storage Safety Estimation Script: Computes the probability of data survival in different RAID and forward error correction configurations. See also the weblog entry.