Author archives: Mike

Idly trying to get my (Lenovo W500) to suspend again this morning as I wait for the washing machine to finish.  Biggest problem is that there are so many sites all with outdated information so I have to filter through hundreds of posts most of which are discussing e.g. Ubuntu 8.10 (which suspended fine with ...

I spent far too long today playing with two different networking systems.  The first was RabbitMQ and py-amqplib.  This seems pretty nice, you can send hundreds of messages in a fraction of a second... though it then seems to take *forever* to process them.  Appears to force in-order delivery, including an explicit ack from the ...

 Began work on simplifying the PyQNet API.  Got rid of blocking/non-blocking versions (everything is non-blocking now, though there's a "wait" operation to block until incoming messages are received).  Also simplified the callback-based (server) interface.  Added (optional) zlib compression to the packages and added support for arbitrarily sized messages.

Probably next up would be getting the ...

Behdad is going to be presenting how to use PyCairo.  PyCairo is a immediate-mode 2D rendering library.  It can target all sorts of back-ends including OpenGL, X windows, PDF, etceteras.

[Update] We'll still be on Wednesday, but turns out Behdad is unavailable due to the turmoil in Iran.

I've just released the Python 2.6 compatible version of SimpleParse.  The only changes of note were the 2.6 fixes and a renaming of the simpleparse.xml module to simpleparse.xmlparser, as under Python 2.6 import semantics the "xml" module caused an import conflict.

I've released only the 2.5 win32 egg, as I'm using my Vista machine to ...

Headed out to the "Net Change Week" event this evening.  Got to ranting to Alfonso before the presentations about a few of my pet theories and wound up with this chain:

• we've got a maximum of maybe 50 years before any rogue nation or disgruntled group can acquire the knowledge required to create nuclear weapons ...

Since updating the Kubuntu Jaunty on my main laptop (Lenovo w500) I've lost my hard-won suspend/resume support that I had with Hardy.  If I have nothing running, happy days, suspend/resume works perfectly through multiple cycles.  Certain apps running, no problem suspending/resuming, but Thunderbird and Firefox, I get a dead black screen on an otherwise fully ...

Just about time to do a 3.0.1 release, with the accelerator modules and bug-fixes.  Still have a bug-report about Linux GLUT crashing in glGetError, will have to try to track down and fix that before a release.  Other than that it's just testing, building and testing again...

The book "Don't Make Me Think" has a simple mechanism for doing user testing "on the cheap", we used it to some good purpose and someone asked me about it at TorCHI, so here's a summary:

• do user testing approximately once per month or once every two weeks
• recruit users as closely as possible to ...

We had a lively discussion last night about programmer liability.  Consensus (such as there was) seemed to be that perfectly reliable software is extremely expensive and likely futile as a goal given complexity restrictions, basically if every app must meet milspec the industry as we know it is toast, as costs would go through the ...