Author archives: Mike
Mole perfection achieved (Well, competence, anyway...)
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Snaking,
Vindaloo.
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 ...
I have to admit there's something magical (Gentoo Linux == feeling like a kid at Christmas (sometimes))
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on
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Snaking.
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 karks up email (Day wasted in the main)
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Vindaloo.
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 ...
Long day's slog... (Dragged back into the lion's den)
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Snaking.
Today I had to work on Cinemon again (Bryan and Tim dropped in to work on it). We are finally getting customer interest in building a hierarchy (major part of the functionality). Spent hours trying to use the web interface and eventually had to give up because it's way too slow on the machine. Wrote ...
Sometimes the silliest little things are the most frustrating (Enough to send one screaming back to urllib...)
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Snaking.
So, today was spent on (computer) house-cleaning and then looking at tools for the semi-automation of web-site reviews. It would seem to me that code something like this:
from twisted.web import client
df = client.getPage(
str(self.url),
timeout=20,
)
(though, obviously wrapped up in all the trappings of a Twisted app so that it gets called ...
(Partial) success with the free compiler (mxTextTools-nr and SimpleParse running...)
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Snaking.
Was able to get mxTextTools (with the non-recursive rewrite, for that matter) to compile with the MS Toolkit compiler. Haven't been able to get Numpy to compile because of a missing symbol (which appears to be ftol (as in float-to-long)), but darned if I can find anything which actually makes reference to the function anywhere ...
Oh, almost forgot... (There's a new release of OpenGLContext)
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Snaking.
There've been a few fairly minor changes over the months since Beta 1, so I just released a Beta 2, this *really* should be the last Beta before the 2.0.0 release.
Microsoft Free Compiler (Free-as-in-not-yet-working-for-me...)
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Snaking.
Have been playing with the free command-line Microsoft Visual C++ compiler trying to build Python 2.4a1 extensions. Seems that distutils will need to be patched to make use of it (if it's possible to use it at all). Going to spend a few more minutes on it then head off to bed I think.
GUI Library Evolution (Or, why we have "event" objects...)
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Snaking.
This popped out of Matthew Scott's comment; seemed a little too involved to be writing in a comment (and it's a slow news day).
Context: I'd noted that Matthew's code wasn't using one of the strengths of PyDispatcher, particularly it's ability to allow for unifying parameter names and filtering out extraneous parameters before passing ...
A fairly successful party (Though most of the normal crowd was missing...)
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
Also had a chance to use the digital camera for once. Here, for instance, is Shane, one of the most interesting human beings I know. He gave Rosey and I a copy of Primo Cranium this evening just because I'd asked if someone could bring a copy for those at the party to play. He's ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.