@roguelynn tweeted the other day:
If attendees of this weekend’s intro to python workshop leave with one thing, it’ll be to Google your error messages first and foremost.
— Lynn Root (@roguelynn) February 6, 2014
I had just talked about the technique in my Tools for Reproducible Research course, and I had a few recent examples.
Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
I was logged into a department server, trying to clone a private repository from GitHub, and got an error like
(gnome-ssh-askpass:1731): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
I googled that, and the first item was a stackoverflow question, whose answer said “unset SSH_ASKPASS”, which totally worked.
except KeyError, k: raise AttributeError, k
AsciiDoc was giving me this error:
asciidoc -a data-uri -a toc -a toclevels=4 -a num example2.txt
File "/usr/local/bin/asciidoc", line 101
except KeyError, k: raise AttributeError, k
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Google the “except KeyError” line, and you get to a Q&A on the AsciiDoc google group, which says “Asciidoc is Python 2, not 3.”
mclapply isn’t working in windows
I got a report that parallel processing in my R/qtl package wasn’t working in Windows.
I googled “mclapply isn’t working windows” (because mclapply was the function I was using) and got this stackoverflow page, which says:
since Windows does not have fork(), it will run standard lapply instead - no parallelization