Author archives: Mike

Being a python programmer, I tend to write Python scripts to solve little problems that arise, for instance:

• Download my Sourceforge projects' CVS repositories into a directory for backup every week
  
• process CVS logfiles to help with generating changelogs
  
• add my python-coding sub-vocabulary to Dragon Naturally Speaking
  
• backup mozilla profile and secondary mail directories as ...

I think I've just discovered an anti-pattern in my code. Unfortunately, it's a really common idiom in the code base. Basically, I've been using dictionaries initialised with all records in a tracking table to make looking up a particular record very fast.

If you're going to be looking up individual records many times, and are ...

The article is summarising various surveys to give a broad-brush summary of the positions. Liberals are backing away from the (stupidly one-sided-media-corporation-inspired) stance they had espoused just before the election.

The NDP is basically climbing in bed with big-media and telling the citizenry to ahem themselves, for cripes sake, the WIPO treaty is basically a ...

I spent a truly inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how the heck to make an SVG graphic navigable... that is, how to make the darn viewer show scrollbars. Apparently it just isn't something that is supported. If you're SVG is "stand alone" and larger than your viewport it just gets clipped. Which ...

Lisa, Shiva and I will likely be going on a car-hike on the weekend of the 25th. Natasha (former gf) wants to do one as well, much sooner than that (i.e. in 10 days or so). I put on shoes today for the first time since dancing on Saturday... ouch... the "wounds" are definitely not ...

Too wired (far too much caf coffee at PyGTA) to work on Cinemon directly this evening (luckily I was pretty much done anyway), so I dumped the live database and am loading it into Gentoo.

Since it's taking forever I've been doing some work to create and submit ebuilds for many of my open-source projects. ...

Instead of a 1.8MB file, I get a 14KB file. Instead of taking 10 seconds to produce, it takes an unnoticably small time. It's a heck of a lot faster to load, and it's much easier to understand. Anyway, now that I've got the layout algorithm working, I can start adding in the node visualisations ...

Whole day so far has been layout algorithms. So far even just the lines for the graph are 1.8MB of SVG. The problem is that generic layouts wind up creating extremely imbalanced graphs, but doing the analysis of which groups to give more space is taking far too long. Oh well, continuing to slog on ...

Has a right-wing gent on with a book about the connection between Al Quaeda and Iraq and he just lost the whole objectivity thing when the chap came up with some gem about mustard gas use in the Iran-Iraq war being unproven (keep in mind the topic of the guest's book). Was funny, but it ...

Have just released a new version of TwistedSNMP which now catches errors during attempts to send messages and reports them back to the original deferred call.

Also released version 1.0.0 (final) of PyDispatcher, which lets you set up multi-producer-multi-consumer communications channels within a Python process. No big changes there, PyDispatcher has been basically stable ...