Author archives: Mike

We've had some pretty extensive rewriting going on for the last few months in one of the big customer projects (the VoIP billing system). Spending three or four days in here stabilising the code base, tracking down all the little refactoring errors that didn't get caught with the test suite, fixing bugs that fell into ...

Blake was good enough to prod me abound getting PyOpenGL 3.x to run under py2exe'd applications. The problem is that even if you copy the .egg directory to the distribution directory the setuptools entry points don't get registered, so PyOpenGL can't find its array-handling mechanisms.

After lots of trial and error I just wound up ...

Dropped into visit the kids (Soni's nephew and niece) this afternoon. Was hoping we'd be able to play Age of Empires II (Gent is learning it), but their dad was sleeping in the room with the computer. Discussed physics, cosmology and a few other things with them, then rounded out the visit with chocolate and ...

After days and days of work building test cases and testing on database images I ran a "fix a screw up" script yesterday only to find out this morning that the "fix" wound up making the problem far, far, worse. Spent the entire day trying to fix that today.

The problem, it turns out, is ...

We run our home/office access point in WPA encrypted mode. This is, AFAIK the only reasonably secure protocol available in the common Linksys WRT* routers.

It works very well on my Gentoo laptop using madwifi (and has worked well for quite a while now). Took a bit of fiddling, probably 4 or 5 hours, but ...

About to run the fix-up script for an error that's about 1.5 weeks old now. The script generates 337 emails to customers, alters the database in 4 or 5 ways and generally has all sorts of ways in which it could screw up in very public and end-customer-annoying ways.

I've just run a test run ...

Going to attempt to set up a Sugar development environment. The Gentoo installation stuff doesn't work any more (everything is masked out due to bugs/instability now). Apparently it'll run in a Qemu environment that allows for development work. Might be a workable solution if I can mount a directory into the image from the workstation. ...

Tim tells me that the ZODB (Zope Object Database) in which this blog is housed has grown to 12GB, largely composed of enormous amounts of comment spam. He's looking at how to shrink it down to something reasonable, but if that's the kind of spamming rate we're seeing we're going to need some way to ...

My plan last Wednesday was to get a given feature finished, have the customer review it on Thursday and then do some polishing. Various factors killed my productivity on Wednesday and Thursday (much of it being an aborted attempt to create the "right" system instead of the "right now" system). Still, woke up Friday planning ...

I spent most of yesterday and half of today trying to track down a bug in email sending from the billing system. We hadn't changed any code, but were suddenly seeing duplicate emails. Spent ages trying to find something wrong with the code, eventually just had to assume it was a system-level problem.

So, plaintive ...