Author archives: Mike

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Weekend saved by former gf (I'm morally opposed to spending a perfect weekend doing nothing but working...)


Since the Bruce Trail hike was canceled (both partners sick), I was contemplating spending the entire weekend working. I don't mind working, but it's unbelievably gorgeous outside, and I feel a little stupid sitting inside.

So, called up my former girlfriend to see if she felt liking going out for coffee. Instead she proposed going ...

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Panda and Soya 3D (Mr. Radix goes to graphics...)


Christopher Armstrong (a.k.a. Radix) has been playing with Soya 3D lately. Unfortunately, it's a GPL library, so of not particular interest to me, but apparently he's enjoying it.

Every so often I think I should really do some serious work on OpenGLContext, particularly on game-oriented features, so that it would be interesting as more than ...

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Beginning move to the new domain (Roger's karking of email prods me into motion...)


As you can see from the URL you are now viewing, I'm moving into my new domain space. Update any URLs you have for the old blog to point to http://blog.vrplumber.com instead. Eventually I'll be moving my web-presence to http://www.vrplumber.com as well, but as I don't have useful CGI or Zope over on Rogers I ...

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PySpelling for fuzzy matching (Little experiments...)


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 ...

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Redefining foreign keys, much easier than I thought (Accessing database over ssh w/ 10 network hops is *very* slow...)


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 ...

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Dratted postgresql failures are getting in the way... (I know, I know, if I hadn't poked where I shouldn't have I wouldn't have this problem...)


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 ...

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Firefox and Thunderbird switch... (Switched to fix broken spell-check, now it works in Mozilla but not Thunderbird)


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 ...

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Things to learn... (Functional programming language)


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 ...

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PyOpenGL 2.0.1.08 released (Just a minor bug-fix release...)


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. ...

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Microsoft Free Compiler Working (Testing builds are operating quite happily)


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.