Author archives: Mike

We happened to be building a new build server today, and one of the steps in the process is to install packages.  We download all of the packages to local disk in one step (pip install --download ${packages}), then install them in the next step (pip install --no-index --find-links ${packages}).  Thing is, while pytz downloaded ...

I finally caved in to the silky sweet seductive tones of Docker. I can't risk the desktop as I need a working machine, but if the laptop is borked I just lose the ability to work away-from-home for a few days. I'm hoping to set up a whole suite of build/test containers.  If it works ...

If you have a traditional kernel module, such as the one for the ASIX AX88179 (source code) you may be rather reluctant to install it on your Ubuntu 12.04 machine because it requires re-compilation for every kernel upgrade.  Well, that's what dkms is for, so let's turn that source release into a .deb ...

Chris Barker asked about having a PEP 3118 format handler for PyOpenGL. I've played around with this in the past, but always wound up with segfaults due to apparent double-free operations when using ctypes to do buffer work.  Basically, once I GetBuffer() into a buffer the deallocation of the buffer struct in ctypes seems to ...

So you added a totally cool and gnarly view that lets the user specify a POINT on a map (and text coordinates), and then two more to let them view and explore them.  Your users should love you forever... but those dratted users are complaining that the default location is off in the Atlantic ocean ...

A question was asked at the Django Toronto meetup during the metaclasses talk, basically, "what would you use this for"... so, here's my talk on Metaclasses [pdf] from a PyCon of the Python 2.2 era, which addressed that question at some length (the first half of the presentation). It doesn't secifically mention the use-case cited ...

Kubuntu 12.04 with the kubuntu-backports-precise PPA pretty much keeps right up with KDE changes, so there's very little incentive to update to 13.04 at the desktop level. As a result, I've been happy to keep all of our machines on the LTS.  Until now...

Docker doesn't work reliably without a 3.8 kernel.  12.04's AMD proprietary ...

So now you've got your spiffy textual-entry-of-GPS-coordinates-and-map admin GUI and you're wanting to actually let people see your "features" on a map.  olwidget has an InfoMap() which is basically a Map + a single InfoLayer, but it uses a static set of "info" rather than a dynamically updating set. Here's how to hack the dynamic ...

If you are using olwidget to get your geodjango editing up-and-running fast, and you want your users to be able to enter the GPS coordinates textually, as well as via the map, then yay, I've already gone through the pain for you.  Here is a hacky way to get synchronized text-field and map entry using an ...

Doing some trivial GeoDjango today.  All was pretty straightforward, though the tutorial didn't cover how to add PostGIS to an existing DB (you just run the same commands you'd use to create the template against the existing DB, but it needs to be as a DB superuser, so it won't go into a regular migration ...