Author archives: Mike

So once again I tried to port SimpleParse to Python 3.x. After a half-hour or so of playing with doing a complete rewrite in Cython I realized that scope creep was going to kill me, so I went back to the C-coded mxTextTools and started working out how to port that.

First step up was ...

The call for talk proposals is out for PyCon.ca. Haven't yet decided if I should propose one, definitely planning to attend the conference.

We embed Django in devices. There are 100s to 1000s of each device scattered around the world, each controlled by someone who may decide (for perfectly valid reasons) not to update one of those machines for years. Until now, we've used South migrations to allow a machine of any vintage to update to current release ...

This is one of those moments where you finish something and think "why did I go and do that?"

I recall an hour or two ago thinking "you know, wouldn't it be nice to have inotify integrated into Twisted", and that lead me into reading the Inotify man-page, which lead to me thinking "oh, that's ...

So a while ago I purchased an Acer H276HL monitor to replace an old Asus monitor that had developed some weird behaviour where it would get stuck in a strange mode, then just decided not to turn on again. This morning when I got home from the cafe I discovered that new monitor in a ...

So this morning I realized I never actually got the PyOpenGL 3.1.1 release process kicked off. Did a bit of cleanup and testing and booted the first alpha out the door. This is basically just a bug-fix release, though it has some more extensions wrapped/available, as it uses an updated Khronos xml registry. There are ...

So of all the Web Toys, the only one that seems to have staying power so far is the trivial wrapper around espeak Say What. Something about having a robotic voice parrot back whatever you type is really exciting for kids.

I downloaded the TEDLIUM speech corpus last night, and this afternoon I poked around in it and said grr. It uses a NIST Sphere format which is basically a plain-text header followed by encoded samples... it's a WAV file, but with far fewer useful tools. Oh well, thinks I, I'll just transcode the files into ...

So there's a big flamey thread over on python-list about the Python 3.x type-annotation. Thing is, I can't say the annotations seem all *that* important to the behaviour (static type checking): Consider this Python 2.7 decorator-set:

def _func_annotation_for(func):
    """Retrieve the function annotation for a given function or create it"""
    current = getattr(func,'func_annotation',None)
    if current is ...

I continued my long reading in Neural Networks today. I'm now setup with Theano, and working through the DeepLearning.net tutorials... but wow, I was not prepared for the (lack of) speed. Hours and hours to train a network (I don't have an nVidia GPU, so everything is being done on the CPU); my very first ...