I spent the day working on Listener. The bulk of the work was just cleanup, getting TODO items set up, fixing the setup script, etc. The actual task of voice dictation didn't get moved very far (I got a trivial "correct that") event working, but it doesn't actually make anything happen.

I also started thinking about how to integrate with other applications (and the desktop). That will likely be done via DBUS services, one for the "send keys" virtual-keyboard service and another for the per-session voice-dictation context.

So at some point I need the voice dictation client to be able to do basic interactions with applications on the desktop (think typing text and the like). So how do I go about doing that? I want to be compatible with Wayland when it shows up, but still work on X (since that's where I'm working now). That would seem to preclude using X event sending. What about making a "virtual keyboard" that actually sends the events through the Linux kernel event subsystem?

The resulting spike-test is checked into the listener project. It seems to work. Yay ...

So you have an audio stream where you'd like to get a human-friendly readout of the current audio level. You add a level component, but how do you actually get the level messages it generates?

            bus.add_signal_watch()
            bus.connect( 'message', self.on_level )

It really seems that you *should* be able to use element.connect(), but there doesn't seem to be an available event to which to connect on the level. So, you wind up having to process all of the events and look for your level event...

    def on_level( self, bus, message ):
        """Level message was received"""
        if message ...

Since I got asked about this in email I'll post it here for the google-verse. Say you want to allow your developers to use RunSnakeRun running in a virtualenv on an Ubuntu distribution.  You'll recall that normally to run RSR as a utility you do:

$ sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8
$ pip install --user SquareMap RunSnakeRun
$ runsnake

That gets a bit more complex when you want to put RSR in a virtualenv (the question was actually how to make this work on many, many workstations using puppet, but you puppet peoples can figure that out). Building wxPython is not ...

So you have an internal device the web-gui of which you want authenticated users to be able to access.  You've got nginx running on the front-end server. You're willing to open up a port on the outside firewall, but all access on that port needs to go through your main web-app's permissions. You setup an nginx proxy like so:

upstream internal_gui {
    server 198.51.100.5:443 fail_timeout=0;
}

That sets up your upstream proxy. Here we're connecting to ssl. We then setup a server to listen on a high port (using ssl). It has two ...

There is a very minor new release on PyPi to allow Squaremap (and thus RunSnakeRun) to run on wxPython 3.0.0. The only people likely to be affected are those on bleeding-edge distros (Gentoo, Arch) or Windows.  You should be able to

pip install --update SquareMap

To get the latest version. Thanks to Kristof for the fix.

After far too long, and way more changes than originally intended, PyOpenGL 3.1.0 final is now out. The big changes are:

So I've been doing a spike test with a project where I'm trying to use React.js to build a front-end to a Django application. The bulk of this application is basic Django forms, posts, page-loads, etc. but there's a number of complex views for scheduling, content uploading etc. As of now I think I'm willing to say that React is going to become part of my toolbox. There are definitely some issues that I gather Facebook has addressed in their "Flux" framework, but that seems to go a bit too far for me.

Things I ...

So the source of the segfaults that I'm seeing on fglrx and FreeGLUT on Kubuntu 14.04 has come to light. It's a known issue with the registration of FreeGLUT and fglrx at-exit handers (at the C level). You can work around it in your own code with PyOpenGL 3.1.0b3+ (which is still pending release) using:

        try:
            if fgDeinitialize: fgDeinitialize(False)
        except NameError as err:
            pass # Older PyOpenGL, you may see a seg-fault here...
        import sys
        sys.exit( 0 )

Where fgDeinitialize is available in the GLUT namespace.

I just finished doing a clean test run across those 3 releases of Python with each of the 8 major config flags on/off (i.e. 48 runs of the test suite). As expected, almost all of the failures were in Python 3.x, and mostly related to unicode, where COPY_ON_ERROR generated failures when a unicode string was passed in; but those were almost all *usage* errors (i.e. errors in the test suite).

However, a nasty real bug in the non-accelerated buffer handler was found and is now fixed (the accelerated code uses the C API directly, so it ...