Why is nothing drawn in PyGame at all?

i have started a new project in python using pygame and for the background i want the bottom half filled with gray and the top black. i have used rect drawing in projects before but for some reason it seems to be broken? i don’t know what i am doing wrong. the weirdest thing is that the result is different every time i run the program. sometimes there is only a black screen and sometimes a gray rectangle covers part of the screen, but never half of the screen.

read subprocess stdout line by line

My python script uses subprocess to call a linux utility that is very noisy. I want to store all of the output to a log file and show some of it to the user. I thought the following would work, but the output doesn’t show up in my application until the utility has produced a significant amount of output.