Author archives: Mike
Enlightened self interest (Why even bother trying to sleep... well... other than to let my hands rest... which isn't happening with all this blogging)
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Vindaloo.
The tension between left and right can be thought of as a pull between collective idealism and individualism.
However, the philosophers of the right, in explaining how a society without left-wing thinkers would work (i.e. without anyone willing to do anything they don't want to do) tend to eventually come up with the idea of ...
Maybe I should just report when I *can* sleep (Reduce the blog-traffic considerably...)
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Vindaloo.
A few new poems on the texts page. Nothing really interesting, just can't-get-to-sleep ramblings that could use some editing.
Is stress the prod that gets evolution going (Do chemical alterations in the cell affect the accuracy of DNA replication, producing more mutations?)
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Vindaloo.
A few coffees ago with Lara and Shane, we were discussing the age-old design versus evolution "problem". In my daily reading, I've just stumbled upon this article.
In the article they are just noting that stress is accellerating the reduction of the "protective" tails of the DNA strands (telomeres). Telomeres appear to act (speculation) ...
Natasha finishes her novel (Apparently part of an internet competition...)
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Vindaloo.
Natasha informs me that she's completed the novel, which apparently qualifies her as winner of a given competition. Congrats to her.
Spent the evening having a few friends over for dinner (Shane, Lara and Golnar). Made molé, which I think I can now say I have mastered (well, my own version of it anyway).
Doesn't look like it's in any condition to update to using v4 (PySNMP is hard enough to use with full releases...)
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Snaking.
After a few attempts to get everything working with PySNMP v4a1, think I'm going to have to shelve that work and move back to PySNMP 3.x. Whatever fixes may have shown up, the amount of rewriting it's requiring is just too much to consider in the middle of trying to track down this memory leak. ...
Seem to have fallen behind in tracking PySNMP (Apparently there's a version 4 now...)
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Snaking.
PySNMP (which is where I'm trying to track down the memory leak at the moment) appears to have a new version in development (in CVS). Really should have been paying attention to what changed before I hit "update" in the CVS module. Looks like some pretty serious refactoring.
Also appears to have a MIB parser ...
Need to put together a PyCon presentation proposal (or three) ("Functional embarrassment to exploding decorators, the creation myth of descriptors")
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Snaking.
Also would be nice to have PyOpenGL-as-ctypes as a presentation, but that requires getting enough time to actually finish (heck, start) the project.
Maybe should do something for BasicProperty, PyTable and wxOO, just a quicky "save yourself some work" thing. Maybe build a wxPython UI for Cinemon just to be perverse :) .
Hmm, ...
My subconscious needs dream-writing lessons (Retro dream-style reasserts itself...)
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Design Theory,
Vindaloo.
Just had a dream in a style that I haven't had much since leaving architecture, very film-noire, lots of montage and suggestive imagery, with really hard-to-interpret symbols crawling over various surfaces.
The dream was a standard "get your house in order" type thing, set in a cottage, where my mother, father and myself were moving ...
Anyone know a decent tool for finding memory leaks? (Even being able to reliably and automatically determine *if* there's a leak would be good...)
Written by
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Snaking.
Pinning down memory leaks in large-ish systems with large numbers of libraries is a bit of a pain. I wind up using the silly Windows task manager (yes, I'm still using Windows, despite having fixed Linux (sort-of) a while ago). Sure, I don't do this very often, but would be nice to have tools when ...
Memory leaks in TwistedSNMP (Tracking things down that shouldn't leak...)
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Snaking.
Seems as though there's something leaking memory in TwistedSNMP (I've been tracking down Cinemon's leak). Doesn't appear to be particularly large, but with the number of queries Cinemon does, could be a contributor. Haven't yet figured out where the silly error is inside TwistedSNMP (more precisely, I've determined which test cases are leaking, I just ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.