Memory Leak

My father received an e-mail from a friend of his asking if fixes I made earlier in the year might interfere with the installation of cable internet happening at that moment. Apparently, the cable guy had been there for 2 hours trying to get online from my father’s friend’s laptop. When I showed up to figure out if it was my fault, I immediately diagnosed the problem: the cable modem wasn’t getting an IP address. The laptop had a fine connection to the router/modem, so it couldn’t possibly be something wrong computer-side. I pointed this out to the cable guy, and he relayed my message to tech-support, whom he was on the phone with. The curt reply, “It’s fine”, only vindicated my opinion that the front lines of support for technical services almost never know what’s really going on.

Of course, it wouldn’t be reasonable to think that “solving” the problem would work. To hire technically savvy people on the front lines would be wasting money and aggravating for everyone involved. It would be just like my situation, only in reverse and happening far more frequently; technically savvy people usually become easily frustrated when dealing with those who aren’t technically savvy. Even so, it wouldn’t kill companies to assume that they screw up every once in a while. I predict that the cable guy will be there for another 3 hours before he figures out there’s nothing for him to do.

Python is a glorious language; a decent amount of documentation (not as much as PHP and Java, but far more than any other language) plus a great library of built-in functions (easy GUI library built-in!) make programming in Python fun. The only headache I’ve discovered thus far is distribution. There are a few projects that exist which are designed to package all your python source code and necessary library files (DLLs on Windows, SOs on Unix/Linux) so you can distribute a folder containing all you need to run the program. Unfortunately, this turns a 2 KB PY file into a 2 MB distribution folder. I know that a lot is required to run a Python program, but this kind of ballooning can be discouraging.

One project, PyInstaller, seems to be able to package all the files together into a single executable and manages to keep the number of imported libraries down to those you actually use. I haven’t tested it on non-Windows, but it took a rudimentary chat-server I wrote and made a stand-alone executable out of it, which ran fine. I also haven’t tested the executable on a computer without Python installed to make sure it doesn’t have any dependencies. PyInstaller is a continuation of a similar installer written by Gordon McMillan whose website seems to have disappeared.

If this works out, I may be able to re-write some of my other useful applications in Python and make them easier to maintain and distribute.