Archives 2005

Mostly a backgrounder on the US' creation of an empire among "third world" countries during the later half of the 20th century. Might be worthwhile getting the book.

Think I finally killed the "rescan unresolved modems frequently" feature request. It wound up showing up a number of other bugs here and there and just made the whole process messy. Switching to Linux in the middle of it probably wasn't a great move on my part.

Speaking of which, I've apparently karked the video ...

I spent an hour or so today emailing Jelle regarding his project. He's using evolutionary techniques (or, rather, is intending to do so) for programming his experiment and that got me thinking. For those who aren't familiar with the idea, an evolutionary programming approach defines a feedback loop where a set of solutions are tested ...

I've been testing my changes since switching back to Linux by using Firefox. That's fine, but there's no AMD64-compatible SVG plug-in that I'm aware of for Firefox. There's also no flag for building MozSVG into Firefox that I can find, so, it's off to Mozilla (the suite). Problem there is that it has started taking ...

Jelle's project is scripting Radiance, so I need to install it. So far it's not marked as working on AMD64 in Gentoo portage. Hopefully it will just build and run :) . My eyes are not in great shape (kinda blurring as I try to read the screen), so I'm trying to avoid doing anything ...

Thunderbird on Windows always seems to pick up a good default font size for the message-list and tree panes. On Linux it picks some god-awful small font that, after a few hours, starts to make my eyes ache (and when one's sister is just getting over an eye infection, bloodshot, watery eyes tend to make ...

I try to at least make everything modestly testable, but sometimes it just seems to bog down the day's work...

I've got this fairly simple requirement; rescan unresolved records in the CMTS tables every minute or two to determine whether the modem has come back online. That was pretty easy to write. The problem is ...

Okay, decided to spend my jittery hours seeing about getting those last few items keeping me off of linux taken care of. Item number one; Personal Video Recorder. As regular readers may remember, I've given up on MythTV and am concentrating on FreeVO (mostly because, as it's written in Python, I might have a chance ...

PyGTA meeting was this evening. Greg Wilson gave a talk about his course at the University of Toronto and about his attempts to make Python more acceptable to the academic community (for which he got a PSF grant for this year).

Was interesting to hear his perspective, and I agree with the general principle that ...

Woke up this morning to AVG flashing messages telling me that multiple files in the system32 folder were infected (and that it didn't know how to fix them). Fixed that (eventually) by deleting the DLLs and then manually unpacking them from their source CDs, AVG now reports the whole machine is clean. However, it really ...