Thursday, July 31, 2014

[Announce] BARCAMP NAIROBI 2014 – Who’s Your Data’s Daddy?


Nairobi’s premier technology event is back for 2014! The 8th Barcamp Nairobi will be held on Saturday, 30th August, 2014. Barcamp is produced by Skunkworks Kenya – a disruptive collective of Kenya’s best looking and best skilled techies - and will be jointly hosted for the 2nd year by iHub, Nailab and m:Lab East Africa at Bishop Magua Centre, Ngong Road.

Barcamp is an unconference - participants run it. Anyone and everyone can attend. Please join us by registering here. Attendees set the agenda for what’s discussed, lead the sessions and workshops that fill the schedule, and create an environment of innovation and productive discussion.

Who should attend: the curious, the unconventional, the brilliant, the resilient, thinkers, hackers, crackers, builders, coders, techies, writers, artists, ninjas, everyone.

  • Come prepared to: share ideas, challenge ideas, engage with others
  • Bring: gadgets, code, designs, community attitude, friends, deodorant
  • Don’t bring: wordy powerpoint presentations, hubris, suits and ties

Hashtag #BarcampNBI

The theme for Barcamp Nairobi 2014 is:
Who's Your Data's Daddy?
Is privacy and security online possible in Kenya?

We entrust our most sensitive, private, and important information to private technology companies. At the same time the increasing usage of technology has attracted the attention of authorities eager to provide caveats on the openness of the Internet and the range of freedoms, which we enjoy online.
At Barcamp Nairobi 2014 we are eager to talk about privacy and surveillance, we will explore if there are any strategies and solutions that Kenyan citizens, corporations and governments are using to protect their privacy and security online.

  • Have time? Volunteer for Barcamp Nairobi 2014 here.
  • Have money? Sponsor Barcamp Nairobi 2014. Email info@barcamp.co.ke for more information.
  • Want to attend? Register for Barcamp Nairobi 2014 here.
  • Want to speak? List your topic here.

Barcamp Nairobi 2014 is free to attend. Stay tuned to http://barcamp.co.ke/ for more details.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

file locking using a context manager (with statement) in python

I needed a quick locking mechanism to prevent my daemons from stepping over each other. To have a sane daemon startup (and prevent multiple daemon spawns), we need to ensure that we have an exclusive lock before starting the program.  Googling around didn't lead to show any context managers that actually use the flock syscalls.

So here goes my attempt that seems to work:

Spinning off some python processes that utilise this context manager shows serialisation taking place:
And here's the output of lsof showing locking for the processes spun off above: