Author archives: Mike

There have been 4 momentary blackouts this evening, where the power has gone out for only a fraction of a second. Every time it does that, the computer speakers make a rather loud noise. It so happened that when it happened, I was lying down, trying to get my shoulders and hands to relax.

Strangely, ...

Seem to be finished the hierarchy discovery conversion (I'm sure there's still missing parts, but it seems to work). Now I get to integrate the actual steady-state scanning code (which has been running for a month or two) with it. After that I do the loading of location data, then the archiving/statistics machinery.

All of ...

Full-featured databases tend to have low-level locking mechanisms such that if a particular thread or client has modified a row in one transaction, then attempts to reference that row in other transactions are blocked. When your database interface (e.g. PyPgSQL) doesn't allow for sharing transactions between threads, you can (when a problem occurs) wind up ...

When you wind up back-modifying large-ish bodies of code to work in entirely new ways, you wind up with a lot of areas where the fit isn't wonderful. In this case, the ping scanner was written with the assumption that the entire hierarchy was coming from database, and so therefor every operation could rely on ...

Just seems insane to me that people can get patents on what are essentially just ideas. It should not be possible to patent "using a computer + network to do x", yet that's what's being done. It should not be possible to patent basic mathematics or algorithms, yet we allow it. And every time we ...

The day's work was basically getting the hierarchy-discovery code moved into the ping-scanner framework. As a side effect, I've finally built a full-system simulator for the CMTS+Channels+modems... makes writing tests much easier, which in turn gives a better feel to the development process... a good day :) .

The actual mock CMTS + Modems are ...

Just got back from the free movie night at U of T. Rather a large crowd for the early show (The Italian Job, which honestly wasn't that spectacular a movie), much smaller for the late show. Was good to see Natasha, but had one of those moments; you know, the one where the woman is ...

Wound up going to Shiva and Shademan's place on Sunday, then had Shane and Golnar over for dinner yesterday, going to Shademan's parent's place for dinner, then out to see Farenheit 9/11 this evening, and if the weather is good, planning to go see a movie in the UofT football field tomorrow. I dimly remember ...

For days now I've been working in Twisted, building a severely trimmed-down version of Cinemon. Every so often little glimmers of greatness show up, but then I have to create yet another 2 functions to deal with success/failure cases, and the glimmer fades.

As I've mentioned time and again to anyone who will listen; the ...

As mentioned a while ago, I was trying to build a chaining mechanism into TwistedSNMP's OIDStore mechanism, the idea being that you could mix-and-match OIDStores so that you could compose test-cases readily from pre-built OIDStore fragments.

Problem was that the code became hideous. It's just a graph-traversal algorithm, but the code wasn't written with graph-traversal ...