Author archives: Mike

As mentioned a while ago, I was looking for a firmware packager that would allow for "user uploads a signed bundle" style upgrades for hardware devices.  Esky is similar (even a similar on-disk layout), but focused on cross-platform and distutils-based "application" setup.  Fussy is intended for "core of a system" setups, where the entire user ...

Query came up on PyOpenGL-dev this morning about how to handle GLchar pointer arguments.  These are binary-specified arguments, they are human-readable text *most* of the time, ascii source-code and identifiers, that kind of thing, but nothing about GLchar pointer requires that they be ascii.  They *are* 8-bit character strings (that's what GLchar pointer means).

But ...

I'm wondering if this package exists, preferably in Python (well, I *know* it exists, as I wrote it for a commercial project, and can't use it any more.  I'm hoping there's an Open Source version I can enhance for future use):

• bundle a .tar.gz (signed, optionally encrypted) for delivery to embedded platforms
• on platform, decrypt ...

Spent the afternoon at Research in Action (at University of Toronto).  Highlights:

• big classical (i.e. right out of the textbook) neural network used for road detection in satellite imagery; okay results, huge amounts of computing power involved; not sure it's really all that much better than a hand-coded solution, but it did seem to work ...

One of the nice new features in Django 1.4 is that it allows you to (easily) detect an upstream server's use of ssl using request.is_secure().  This means that your nginx configuration can use http or https on the same server and your Django site can detect it.  The magic is accomplished by *always* setting a ...

Say you want to target audio to one of N (virtual) devices in ALSA for a tree of processes.  That is, you want to say "hey, all you lot, play out channels 2 and 3 of the sound card as though they were a separate card" and then tell another set of processes to do ...

I'm trying to code up a service that needs to auto-play presentations (mostly Powerpoint).  Users (who may not be at all technically savvy) need to be able to upload the files and have them advance regardless of whether they have properly specified auto-play settings (if they *have* set the advance properly, we want to respect ...

I'm sure there must be a really nice packaging of this, but so far all I've found is example projects that don't quite do what I'd want... so here's the basic setup; you have a Django model with File fields that you want to convert to using JQuery File Upload.  For now, we'll assume you ...

If you need PIL in your custom Python 2.6 build (your build needs to be custom if you want to target LTS Ubuntu Server's default Python while working on a more recent Ubuntu), you will likely find your PIL build doesn't work (because, of course, you have a 64-bit build of Ubuntu and the libraries ...

As mentioned a few times, Matt Davis and I taught the Python section of the Software Carpentry Boot Camp this past week.  Overall the experience was positive.  We had approximately 4 (stretched to 5) hours, and developed our own curriculum with a fairly strong narrative.  Almost every exercise focused on a task, taking a CSV ...