Author archives: Mike

I've mentioned the "magic" feeling that sometimes pops out of the emerge system on Gentoo. Last night it happened again. I realised I hadn't emerged any cron daemon yet, so I stopped the emerge -U world, quickly emerged vixie-cron, then restarted the world emerge.

Having done that, I settled down to my normal pattern of ...

Much of yesterday was taken up fixing a design flaw in the EFT server. In essence, I'd modelled transactions as abstract objects to which messages should be attached. That's fine, but it's overkill for what we're actually doing, and makes everything rather slow.

The solution was to make the messages themselves model the transactions. That ...

I'm back to the point where I can trust Gentoo again. I was burned badly by that whole "setting -march and building world turns the entire machine to chutney" thing. Still, just an hour or so ago I once again made the leap of faith and emerged the world for the new server.

Moved a long way forward on Cinemon this evening. The two data-importers are now working with in-memory models of the geographic entities (instead of database-based ones). Reduces load times to a second or two. Haven't got the hierarchy importer actually kicking-off the watchers or spitting back a cleaned up version of the file, but that ...

So, after giving up in disgust on the PyOpenGL 2.1 work, I decided that I was in the mood for something fairly mechanical. Since the Athlon (original Athlon, not XP, not 64) has been sitting unused since I built the Athlon64, I decided to install Gentoo on it and get started on building an IMAP ...

Giving up on PyOpenGL for the night. Creating a C-level API for a Python module requires either manually maintaining huge vtables, or somehow modelling the whole set. I've been trying to go with modelling the functions in Python, and that just isn't working, it's too awkward to modify the parts that need modification.

Don't know ...

Spending the day working on PyOpenGL. So far a couple of significant bugs and one setup problem fixed. Now starting work on the 2.1.0 branch again.

One of my major goals for 2.1.0 is to make the wrappers more flexible wrt which Numpy versions (if any) are loaded, and potentially to allow for substituting Numarray ...

Was intending to skip it and spend the night working on Cinemon, but I suppose actually talking with Bryan would be a good thing too. Still frustrated with Twisted's documentation. Took a quick break to work on a Job Jar item for the web-checker program.

It's so much easier to work when you have an ...

Frustrating couple of hours here trying to get Twisted to either use a serial port or a TCP port to test the EFT server. Mostly it's frustrating because the API documentation doesn't tell you what methods are doing, what they return, what their arguments should be, how to deal with the results to accomplish common ...

I've been working on other projects for a couple of weeks now, ripping pieces of Cinemon's application framework out and using them for the other projects as I go. Today I took my "day off" to try to move Cinemon forward.

Most of the day was spent working on the hierarchy-importer. That moved forward quite ...