Category archives: Snaking
Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python
Automating page-forwarding, an admin script (Generating silent-forwarding pages for sites...)
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Snaking.
I've just finished the move to the vrplumber.com domain. One of the things I wanted to do was to make sure that anyone linking to the old site would get redirected to the new site automatically.
I intend to keep the Rogers account around for a while, so I can put page-forwarding code on it. ...
Panda and Soya 3D (Mr. Radix goes to graphics...)
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Snaking.
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 ...
PySpelling for fuzzy matching (Little experiments...)
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Snaking.
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 ...
Redefining foreign keys, much easier than I thought (Accessing database over ssh w/ 10 network hops is *very* slow...)
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Snaking.
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 ...
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...)
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Snaking.
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 ...
Things to learn... (Functional programming language)
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Snaking.
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 ...
PyOpenGL 2.0.1.08 released (Just a minor bug-fix release...)
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Snaking.
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. ...
Microsoft Free Compiler Working (Testing builds are operating quite happily)
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Snaking.
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.
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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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 ...
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.