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Installing PySide into a virtualenv

I’ve been struggling to install a portable/relocatable virtualenv with PySide 1.2.2 for Python 2.7. On Windows, this works out of the box but it’s more difficult on Linux and OS X, although I came up with a patch for OS X. This guide will not go into detail on portability/relocatability and will merely touch upon how to get started with PySide in a virtualenv. It looks like PySide 1.2.3 will have substantial changes which will allow for easier portability/relocatability and I will make a post on that as soon as it is generally available.

Getting quick access to new Google Cloud SDK features

There is a two-week delay before gsutil gets updated with the latest and greatest. If you want to try the new stuff out, pip install the SDK!

sudo yum install gcc openssl-devel python-devel python-setuptools libffi-devel
sudo yum install python-pip
sudo pip install -U gsutil

Then execute gsutil like this:

/usr/bin/gsutil

To access beta (or even alpha) features of gcloud, execute gcloud like this:

gcloud beta compute instances ...

File copy progress window with PyQt/PySide and shutil

I recently wanted to show the progress of a file copy made from a python script (or actually, from a python script running inside of Maya and Nuke). First I looked to piggyback on the OS native ways of copying a file, but oddly enough it turned out there was no way of showing a progress bar when doing this.

Kill process by search string

In Linux, you can kill all processes by name (or by username etc) using something like this:

kill -9 $(ps aux | grep 'some_process_name' | awk '{print $2}')

3D rendering in the Google Cloud

Guest blogging for Google!

As a small design and visualization studio, we focus on creating beautiful 3D imagery – be it high-resolution product images or TV commercials. To successfully do this, we need to ensure we have access to enough rendering power, and at times, we find ourselves in a situation where our in-house render farm’s capacity isn’t cutting it. That’s where Google Compute Engine comes in.

Read more over at the Google Cloud Platform blog.

Copying Maya to network share

If you would like to run a thin client installation of Maya, which means you run it off a network share rather from a local installation, you need to make sure to copy symlinks on Linux.

Find file or folder in Linux

Ever needed to do a simple search for an application, a file or a folder in Linux and when whereis doesn’t return anything useful?

sudo find / -name "some_folder"

Run gsutil from crontab

Setting up gsutil to sync files over to Google Cloud Storage (on CentOS 6) requires some environment variables to be set, which seems oddly undocumented at the moment. Turning to Stackoverflow was the solution, and here’s a summary from that.

What's hogging that folder?

Well, at least in Linux you might find out using this command:

lsof <folder name>