Archives April 2010

Nepomuk/Strigi felt like indexing my desktop to be all semantic-y.  Great... but wow, ~20% CPU for ~12hrs and constant disk thrashing... temperature spiked up pretty bad before I noticed it (not damaging bad, but if there'd been another load on there (i.e. graphics) I'm guessing it would have fried the machine), memory completely exhausted too ...

Seeing ridiculously slow PostgreSQL performance on an application.  Can't claim the application is particularly tightly coded for DB usage (too much ORM-ish-ness), so there's room to improve there, but right now we're seeing the same app 10x slower on the EC2 instances than on my (somewhat high-end) laptop... which makes me wonder if there's some ...

Why do half my tests suddenly fail, thinks me?  Me thinks, me looks, me finds no PIL!  Egadzooks, thinks me, thinking thinkily, what has become of my Python 2.5 PIL?  Aptitude thinks, and returns no thoughts of a Python 2.5 python-imaging?  Me thinks methinks me thoughts must turn to source.

[Update] For those who encounter ...

I upgraded my laptop to Kubuntu Lucid to help test the release.  I've now got debug and crash messages popping up in Eric, Plasma crashing when I remove widgets, mkfontscale crashing if I have my .fonts directory available, multi-second pauses on alt-tab (that one's a killer when you work, as I do, by constantly switching ...

My little experiment in Upstart is going to get rolled back, it appears.  While the system worked perfectly on modern Linux (Karmic Ubuntu), it wouldn't even recognize the scripts as valid on the Fedora 10 servers.  Given that the release of Upstart is so old, I'm thinking I'll wind up managing the 6-7 state transitions/events ...

My current project must run against a DHCP server which has to have a fairly exotic configuration (not really one I'd want running on my home network), and I want to be able to blow away and re-create the client constantly as I test installation procedures and the like.  So, since we're on Fedora 10 ...

Wound up stuck at the Caffe for almost 3 hours as my supposedly minimal Fedora 10 install churned on my non-suspend-capable laptop.  Turns out that you have to deselect *every* checkbox in the Fedora 10 installer to get a minimal install, even things like system tools, text-editors and the like.  The google key word to ...

Been doing system-level wiring for a low-level process for the last few hours, target is Fedora 10, so I can (theoretically) use Upstart for the init scripts... pretty slick stuff, the configs are simple, and I can create my 4-5 somewhat-interdependent processes such that they just kick each other off based on sending events.  The ...

Say you have a PKCS#7 file with an embedded code-image as a field, how would you go about extracting that field's contents?  pyOpenSSL doesn't seem to have mechanisms for extracting/viewing arbitrary fields from PKCS7.  pyasn1 can load the structures, but of course it doesn't have access to the meaning of the fields, and it doesn't ...

Having just written yet another module to pack/unpack data into a particular binary format, I'm wondering if someone has a more effective method they'd like to share?  I'm thinking some module that can handle RLE/TLV type stuff, complex "encodings" such as utf-8 continued charcters, struct-like pack/unpack for static elements, efficient loading of arrays, and bit-field ...