Archives 2015

So I pulled the upgrade switch on the (Dell Inspiron) laptop on Friday. It trundled for almost the whole day doing the upgrade, then rebooted to a black-and-totally-unresponsive screen, with no way to switch to virtual consoles... I did a hard-reboot, booted to recovery console and reinstalled the fglrx (proprietary AMD) drivers, then rebooted... and ...

There's a point in every presentation where you realize "I should have asked for an hour (or 8)"... that's about 1/2 way through in my experience, it's where you've filled the work-table with a thousand items, taking each bullet point you wanted to cover and expanding it to full-lecture size, and now you start the ...

So it has taken far too long to get this done. As our migration operations were tightly coupled to South migrations, South was holding us back for far too long. Today I've pretty-much finished the migration. I wound up embedding a virtualenv inside the firmware for each product that has stub packages, the south migrations, ...

So Moisés has been sending me bug-fix patches for PyOpenGL, and todays (actually Sunday's) pointed out that the multiple-return-parameter case was plainly broken in the PyOpenGL wrapper code. Basically the code would only return the *last* parameter which was setOutput()'d so that the low-level wrappers would return somewhat pointless values rather than returning the tuple ...

So the schedule is up for PyCon.ca. My proposal got accepted, so I get to talk about fun things! Historically the conference sells out, so if you want to come you should likely get your tickets soon.

I finally got my OpenDeep Dataset implementation for the TEDLIUM dataset feeding into a basic generative RNN... and as expected, it's pointlessly slow. Expect to go, say, 100 epochs... and it's already taken ~ 2 hours on the first epoch. Seems like I really do need to get an Amazon account and use that to ...

We happened to win a Kindle Fire HDX tablet at an event. Since we've been talking about getting the kids a tablet for a while I thought "yay, sorted"... until they actually tried it.

There are no apps for the thing. Or, rather, the apps the kids actually use, YouTube, various games, Google Maps, etc, ...

For some reason I've felt the need to open Skype for the past day. That's weird, as I never use Skype (I generally use Google Hangouts). Apparently I skimmed over an article on their outage and it triggered some neuron that said "remember Skype, you used to use that, maybe you should click on it"... ...

PyCon.ca tickets are now on sale. $99 for self-sponsored tickets, $49 if you're a student, 2 days conference plus 1 day sprints, November 7th and 8th. IIUC they've sold out every year, so you likely want to get your order in soon. (Obviously I waited until after I had my tickets to advertise that they ...

So when I started testing the soon-to-be-released KDE Plasma 5.x releases they were... less-than-usable on fglrx (and would fairly frequently fail to come back from suspend/resume), so I had to switch the laptop over to Intel graphics. However, since I need to be able to run OpenCL and OpenGL/GPGPU stuff on the laptop I switched ...