Groovie

Python 2.6 came out yesterday, so I figured I might as well see if Pylons works on it. Pylons already has a set of buildbots that builds Pylons along with some of its dependencies, so it was fairly trivial to add another builder to verify things ran swimmingly on Python 2.6.

Unfortunately, as one can see looking at the build results, things weren’t so great. It appears that nose had a Python 2.6 incompatibility which is used to run all the various Pylons tests, meaning that they all failed so far mainly because the testing tool was Python 2.6 incompatible.

Making Buildbot nicer

While I wait for the new nose to be released, I did at least discover a little bug in my new webapp that provides a nicer view of the buildbot result set. I’ve been fairly displeased with the lack of conciseness of buildbot’s waterfall display for awhile, and noticed that if only buildbot had a few more xmlrpc methods then it’d be trivial to build my own more kind interface.

I should note that the waterfall display isn’t totally horrible, the Django folks spiced their builders up with some CSS work.... which reminds me, it isn’t looking very good for those running on trunk at the moment. ;)

So after making my own little buildbot fork to add some additional custom xmlrpc methods to, I’ve come up with my own buildbot status viewer. I’m sure a more talented designer could spice it up even more, but it gives me the pertinent data I’m interested in without all the boring “builder connected, builder took a vacation” messages that cloud up the waterfall. Also, rather than displaying the cryptic “shell_21 failed” messages, it actually uses the names I attached, and shows them quite clearly for the last build.

I’ll submit some patches for these xmlrpc additions to buildbot when I get the time, but right now I mainly needed the Mercurial 1.0 hook compatibility (that was broken for quite awhile in buildbot), and a fairly specific set of information from the xmlrpc methods that I wasn’t sure others would want.

I’m looking forward to trying out the new nose so that I can hopefully verify Pylons is good to go on Python 2.6 as Phil Jenvey’s been working tirelessly on patches to Beaker and other dependencies to make them 2.6 compatible. Any suggestions or thoughts on improving my buildbot viewer are welcome. :)

Amazingly enough, despite all the hoop-la of how the bailout will pass, on Monday, it failed. It was quite entertaining to me to see a bill that everyone seemed so sure would pass, to just go and fail.

In the meantime I’ve found more than a few interesting links that only go to re-inforce my prior thoughts on the bailout.

The vagueness I noted in some sections of the bailout was quite intentional.

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

Ouch, well that sure is reassuring.

How’d they do? Pretty dang good. They made sure no pesky regulations would affect their golden parachutes, or reduce their paychecks, and they expanded the definition of what assets could be bought to extend beyond just mortgage related securities, to any troubled asset. If some bank has a laundry list of dumb investments that aren’t paying off well, they’re as eligible as anything else if the Treasury considers them at risk of failing (though even what kind of ‘risk of failing’ is required before the Treasury buys such assets seems vague).

Isn’t the point of the free market to let companies that do stupid stuff fail from it?

The NY Times also mentions that many of the financial institutions want to manage the assets that are bought as well, and get paid for it of course, which would generate them a very hefty profit as well.

I haven’t seen a lot in the mainstream media about the huge list of economists (over 165 and counting) who oppose the bailout, which is curious.

So far, this countries track record of hastily passing massive and far reaching pieces of legislation based on hysteria hasn’t worked out too well. It has resulted in a war and all sorts of legislation that is still having ill effects on basic liberties and freedoms. The revised bill which includes more bits to appeal to Republicans doesn’t seem any better, and is still co-written by the financial industry eager to get some more free money.

Ron Paul has some good thoughts on why the bailout is a bad idea, and Michael Moore has an amusing write-up of how to save the banks with plenty of good facts and of a few questionable ones (but overall a good read). I particularly like his #2 point for paying for the bailout.

I disagree with Michael Moore though, mainly because I think Ron Paul and the economists have the right point. Investors should not be subsidized. Investors making risky bets, should take their losses. They clearly want to keep the profit, let them keep the loss as well.

Regardless, I hope the new version doesn’t get passed as well, though given how disappointing the politicians have been for me and the fact that the general public got creeped out watching the investors having a fire-sale means that the financial industry will likely be able to get the new bill passed. Nothing like some hysteria in the stock market to help some legislation creep through.

Ugh.

Update: A rather interesting look at the distribution of wealth in America, figure 5 showing the difference increasing.

Update 2: I should note that the new bailout bill that has had tastier pork tossed in, increased in size by $110 billion, and in size from the 101 page version I read, to a new 451 page bill.

That pretty much negates the odds of most people having enough time to read it, and who knows what other tidbits got buried in it.