up vote 81 down vote favorite
16

... like messing up the Help Center?

What if I see someone doing something bad?

I have a log file being written by another process which I want to watch for changes. Each time a change occurrs I'd like to read the new data in to do some processing on it.

What's the best way to do this? I was hoping there'd be some sort of hook from the PyWin32 library. I've found the win32file.FindNextChangeNotification function but have no idea how to ask it to watch a specific file.

If anyone's done anything like this I'd be really grateful to hear how...

[Edit] I should have mentioned that I was after a solution that doesn't require polling.

[Edit] Curses! It seems this doesn't work over a mapped network drive. I'm guessing windows doesn't 'hear' any updates to the file the way it does on a local disk.

The text seems to be plagiarized from this question, and all other help center links (on all SE sites) seem to be affected as well.

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Entire network is affected – Stijn Mar 10 at 22:28
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All the help center links are doing this; looks like a post cache leaking? stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/site-analytics, for example – Undo♦ Mar 10 at 22:28
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Nick Craver tweet in 3 ... 2 ... – Bart Mar 10 at 22:35
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@Bart poor Nick – Stijn Mar 10 at 22:35
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Nick has been notified and is fixing. – Oded♦ Mar 10 at 22:41
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@Oded should I change the title to What if I see someone, like Nick Craver, doing something bad?? – Glorfindel Mar 10 at 22:51
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Seems appropriate. – Oded♦ Mar 10 at 22:51
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What if I see someone, like Nick Carver, doing something bad? Feel relieved that if the programmers on Stack Overflow can make mistakes, it's not so bad that I do too. :D – Yvette Colomb Mar 11 at 6:36
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To answer the title of the question: "Just let him do it, it is the only way he will learn I'm afraid" :P – Kyle Brandt Mar 13 at 19:18
    
not my fault (spin the wheel) – Sklivvz Mar 13 at 22:31
up vote 79 down vote accepted

So I refactored the logging of the mass rebake route for HTTPS-ing help center articles and I moved a critical variable. The one that says which site to get the article from.

Good news: logging is really awesome
Bad news: all the help articles are from the wrong sites

...a new build is going up that will restore all of these. ETA: ~10 minutes.

Edit: fix complete, everything you saw was an illusion.

Edit 2: Since I'm a giver, here's the fix commit, and I promise not to commit any more code this week:

enter image description here

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I'm now intrigued what site runs help answers like If you do db:schema:load you will loose all your data! :-D – Martijn Pieters♦ Mar 10 at 22:46
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@MartijnPieters google.nl/… – Glorfindel Mar 10 at 22:46
    
@Glorfindel: deleted answer on SO. So the help articles are from answer posts, not the help center. – Martijn Pieters♦ Mar 10 at 22:48
    
@MartijnPieters all help articles from all sites seem to be taken from (relatively old) SO posts. – Glorfindel Mar 10 at 22:49
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I wish I could screw up this badly in my job and get a badge for it. – Hans Passant Mar 10 at 23:01
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Yeah. All I ever get is badgered. :( – terdon Mar 10 at 23:12
    
Half tempted to fix the spelling in that answer. It's a bit loose. – Andrew Grimm Mar 11 at 5:20
    
I am sorry, I should really have written more unit tests around the help center! /ducks – Sklivvz Mar 13 at 22:32
up vote 137 down vote

Here's a couple of gems, from this brief and gloriously underappreciated moment, preserved for posterity:

enter image description here

enter image description here

From chat:

enter image description here

enter image description here

With credit to Sasha for the capture...

enter image description here

from Worldbuilding

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Sometimes I really miss the bounty function on Meta. – Glorfindel Mar 10 at 22:56
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This should come back for April Fool's day. – Travis J Mar 10 at 23:15
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Holy cow, the solution to the review problem. – Hans Passant Mar 10 at 23:29
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This is what Cygwin is for, you know. – Nathan Tuggy Mar 11 at 0:00
    
Curious to know if other metas have their owns preserved too! – Veve Mar 11 at 1:00
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Just vote against McCain and the Republicans Goddamnit, Joel. – Will Mar 13 at 14:40

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