Author archives: Mike

I just upgraded our last machine to Kubuntu 12.04 (the laptop has been running it since a beta).  In place update with about 2 minutes offline... Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu really is amazing that way.

The new Kubuntu is pretty much just like the old Kubuntu.  It works, is very pretty, but just gets out of the way ...

Just stumbled across the OpenGL Samples Pack, which is a bunch of OpenGL sample code for advanced features... exactly the kind of thing I need to test if I've got PyOpenGL working... of course, they're written in C, but it's way easier to translate from C to Python than to come up with dozens ...

http://readthedocs.org/docs/2daypython/

and you can branch and alter/adapt the source (in restructured text) as you wish using:

bzr branch lp:2daypython

One thing that seemed ...

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 ...