Archives June 2004

How many support modules, that is the question (PyOpenGL after kebabs...)


Got home rather early from the dinner at Dave and Shabnam's place. We made kebabs (meat and onions barbequed on flat metal skewers). This is the second time we've tried that. This time was far more successful, with the primary advance being to switch to doing much smaller individual kebabs and being gentle when flipping ...

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Yes, it's another political rant... (I really do want to know what the NDP are smoking these days???)


The Reform Party of Canada have basically moved their ultra-right-wing agenda to being perceived as a middle-right agenda by absorbing the (tiny) centre-right Progressive Conservatives and pretending it was a merger. The result is that both the extreme right and the center right voters are likely to vote for the extreme right.

Worse still, the ...

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Python C modules for PyOpenGL (Wow that's a lot of work for little tangible benefit...)


First half of the weekend's PyOpenGL hacking finished. I spent most of the time working on getting a script put together to auto-generate a base and a numeric module. The idea is that we will try to load the numeric, and if that fails, we'll use the non-numeric, with both modules providing the same external ...

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Templating joys (Slog, slog, slog, slog-slog-slog, slog, slog, slog, slog-slog-slog, slog, slog...)


Bryan truly impressed me today. Been trying to figure out why certain groups are winding up being reported as offline so often. The answer was staring me in the face, but Bryan had to point it out for me to realise it. Fixing it is going to be a bit of a PITA (the proper ...

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Emerges for all! (Oh what a geeky life we lead...)


Tim dropped by this evening, so I figured I may as well do some work on Gentoo. Reworked all of the emerges I created (fonttools, ttfquery, pydispatcher, and twistedsnmp) to conform to the (rather too terse for my taste) Gentoo style.

Then I added drag-and-drop from Konquerer into Eric3 to open files, wound up with ...

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Should check all these scripts into local CVS (Noticable amount of effort could be lost)


Being a python programmer, I tend to write Python scripts to solve little problems that arise, for instance:
  • Download my Sourceforge projects' CVS repositories into a directory for backup every week
  • process CVS logfiles to help with generating changelogs
  • add my python-coding sub-vocabulary to Dragon Naturally Speaking
  • backup mozilla profile and secondary mail directories as ...

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Premature optimisation kills (Well, introduces errors...)


I think I've just discovered an anti-pattern in my code. Unfortunately, it's a really common idiom in the code base. Basically, I've been using dictionaries initialised with all records in a tracking table to make looking up a particular record very fast.

If you're going to be looking up individual records many times, and are ...

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Interesting Star article on parties positions wrt copyright reform... (The NDP seems to be smoking crack...)


The article is summarising various surveys to give a broad-brush summary of the positions. Liberals are backing away from the (stupidly one-sided-media-corporation-inspired) stance they had espoused just before the election.

The NDP is basically climbing in bed with big-media and telling the citizenry to ahem themselves, for cripes sake, the WIPO treaty is basically a ...

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Oh, about the slogging (Little forward motion, mostly just learning the limitations of SVG)


I spent a truly inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how the heck to make an SVG graphic navigable... that is, how to make the darn viewer show scrollbars. Apparently it just isn't something that is supported. If you're SVG is "stand alone" and larger than your viewport it just gets clipped. Which ...

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