Did a bit of work tracking down memory leaks in TwistedSNMP. As Glyph and I had discussed, eliminating the __del__ methods from the Deferred object eliminated the leaks. My fix so far is pretty ugly (introduces two descriptors and a sub-object with a __del__ to provide the functionality, but it does work, so just a matter of making it cleaner at some point.

Then, just as I was hitting my groove, Sandra (downstairs neighbour) called up needing help with a school assignment that is due tomorrow (her assignment, not her children's). So, helped her with that. While we were doing that, she asked if I could set up her computer... so... 4 or 5 hours of installing later...

I wanted to test her DVD drive, so I popped my Fellowship of the Ring DVD into the drive. The computer went into some weird state where Explorer just wasn't able to access anything. After a few minutes of that I popped out the DVD. Eeps! I was seriously hot and had turned a sort of golden colour on the bottom! So I popped it into my machine to see if it had been destroyed... nope, played fine. So I let it play as I continued working on the machine.

Turns out whoever assembled the computer put the CD-R behind the DVD drawer (and there's no DVD drive in the machine). Very annoying... the box is very loud, louder, in fact, than my workstation, which has 2 failing fans in it (both the CPU cooler and the replacement case-exhaust fan).

For the curious; I installed the "standard" suite I normally install on friend's computers, Firefox (with a few themes and useful bookmarks (e.g. local weather, local library catalogue, comics)), OpenOffice (2.0 candidate, configured to save in MSOffice formats by default), AVG Antivirus, ZoneAlarm, Sun JRE, WinAmp, and all the normal web-media plug-ins (plus the Adobe SVG plug-in). They're currently using AOL for email, so I didn't install Thunderbird.

Saw something very strange from ZoneAlarm; there was an ICMP ping from the firewall to the new machine. That suggests that the firewall may have been compromised (it has no business sending ping messages to anything). Will have to disconnect and flash it at some point.