Archives 2004

Left Gentoo last night compiling xorg-x11 (the base windowing system for Linux machines). About 5 in the morning I wake up to find that the dratted thing has stopped with exactly the same errors-in-gcc's-linker that the wipe-and-recreate were supposed to fix.

Tried to boot back into Windows, and it was giving blue-screens-of-death every time. Pulled ...

I'm up to the stage where one builds the kernel in the latest Gentoo install. Probably 4 hours wasted trying to get Knoppix to work as the hosting/building environment.

For some silly reason it kept losing my USB keyboard and mouse. After I switched both to PS/2 connectors that problem was solved, but then the ...

Switched back to the web-"spidering" application yesterday, a few more hours of work today on it. This is really just a web-checking engine that goes out and sees if any of a few tens of thousands of pages have changed in the last day or so and reports the results.

Nothing really complex there, but ...

I use PyTable fairly extensively (actually exclusively) when I'm working with databases. Today, however, I've come up against a limitation that I've long known to exist, but have never before had a reason to fix. Makes for a rather slow hacking day I'm afraid.

In particular, PostgreSQL has a feature which defines distinct namespaces for ...

Party went well. Lots of people I haven't seen in a long time. Snacks, drinks, beautiful women, lots of conversation, and then a rather heated game of Cranium until around 3am. What more could anyone want out of life? Shane took a few pictures for us, so here they are...

I am almost to the point of saying "screw it" and rebuilding the entire Gentoo install. At the least it will give me a chance to practice my backup/restore skills under Linux. So I am currently downloading the CD images for both the generic i686 and the Athlon64 versions.

I figure I'll try the Athlon64 ...

We had rather an involved discussion at the PyGTA meeting on Tuesday. By way of background, a number of the Python programmers in Toronto are working on a project called the "Art Interface Device", which is, in essence an attempt to create a standardized framework for animatronic artwork. At the moment, the system works at ...

Wound up getting two coffee's at the pool hall this evening, so I'm a bit wired. Sounds like the perfect time to try Gentoo again. How many times am I going to rebuild this dratted system I wonder to myself... oh well, maybe it'll build character.

The secret: twisted.web.client.getPage(url) handles SSL (https://) protocols automatically. Nothing I could find in the documentation mentions that. There are references to the ContextFactory, but nothing is mentioned about whether you need to pass one in or not (you don't). So, a simple script to download an SSL page with Twisted looks something like this:

from ...

Rosey went to Canadian Tire to pick up some lamps (her room and the living room are unlivably dark (I get horribly depressed when it's always dark)). Apparently she didn't have time to find any lamps she liked, but she did pick up a replacement bulb for my big halogen floor lamp.

That lamp almost ...