Author archives: Mike

PySpelling is one of my projects that never got finished. I'd originally intended it to be an engine for Chandler, but wound up moving on to other projects. The core engine works fairly well (the algorithm is losely based on ASpell), but it's not the kind of thing Chandler needs these days.

Anyway, I'm rather ...

For those who are interested in how to alter the ON DELETE/ON CASCADE features of a foreign key constraint. There's no need whatsoever to alter the system catalogs directly, I'd just missed the ALTER TABLE variant that drops constraints, namely "DROP CONSTRAINT".

Turns out that the drop commands are using the pg_depend table to decide ...

On Friday I made the mistake of trying to add ON DELETE constraints to a number of foreign-key field references. I wrote a little script that went through and altered the PostgreSQL system tables trying to drop the foreign-key references and then re-generate them with ALTER TABLE. Unforunately, that script messed up by not taking ...

While rebuilding Rosey's machine, I decided to see if I couldn't get Firefox and Thunderbird working on my machine. Problem I've been having is that there's nothing in the UI for the mail client (Thunderbird) for importing Mozilla 1.7 settings and messages (though there's lots for importing from other mail clients).

Anyway, it does appear ...

One of the entries on my "things to learn" list is a functional language, that is, a language in which there are no side-effects and everything is basically a data-flow. Just stumbled across the Haskell home-page.

Side note; unlike the Python page, which immediately offers implementation downloads, you need to go to the "learning" page ...

Released the package last night. You can get it from the PyOpenGL web site. Unfortunately, my sister's computer managed to corrupt it's system folder last night (was making a terrible racket as it tried to do the anti-virus scan), so I'm not going to get a chance to do any v2.1 work this weekend. ...

Since I've been enjoying rather uniform success with it, I've put together a page describing how to use the Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit Compiler to build Python 2.4 extensions. I just compiled PyOpenGL 2.0.1.07 and used it to run a few OpenGLContext demos w/out problem. Now off to PyOpenGL/OpenGLContext hacking.

Today's batch of mole (chocolate "stew") was considerably better than the attempt at the party. The chilies really do make the flavour pop out (the fruit tends to burst and cool down the heat of the chilies).

Spent the day on bug-fixes and trying to make the importer more robust. Did some optimisations, but not ...

So, last night, before going to bed, I made a wish to emerge. "Emerge," I said, "I would really like to try out the xorg-X11 package". And emerge replied with a stream of gobbledygook that means "okay, I'm working on it". Now, some 9 hours later, emerge tells me "it's done! look what I have ...

Rogers decided to replace their entire email infrastructure by outsourcing to Yahoo. In essence, each Rogers customer gets a "premium" Yahoo account (which they have to sign up for explicitly). Problem is, so far the Yahoo servers have given anything but premium service (not to mention the need to agree to let Yahoo and Rogers ...