Category archives: Snaking

Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python

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In other news... (Brief bits)


  • I'm told someone reads this blog!
  • Also, got a commitment from Shiva and Lisa to go hiking with the Bruce Trail club (and me) sometime in July.
  • Made a nice curry, though it was far milder than I'd intended.
  • Watched the season finales of Smallville and Enterprise. Think I'll just stop watching Enterprise. Smallville was ...

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Pinging away (Randomised scanning going slowly)


Spent all of yesterday (after the visit to Tony's) working on the randomised "ping" scanner. Something weird is causing the whole process to be incredibly slow, and I'm beginning to think it's the creation and destruction of database connections in the thread-pool-managed-threads.

Twisted talk went okay (Even with only 2 hours to prepare)


Conversation at the pool-hall afterward was quite animated, particularly the rather long discussion of politics, philosophy and whether humans have a future. Have a meeting at 11am tomorrow with Tony, so should head off to bed ASAP.

The presentation is available, as is the small bit of sample code written explicitly for the presentation.

Twisted talk trashed by power outage and lack of backup (Arrrrgggghhhh!)


The silly UPS didn't catch the power outage, and somehow the file on disk got corrupted, so the presentation is just plain gone. This is *really* frustrating, I was working on the second-to-last slide already. Now I have to re-start from the beginning with less than 3 hours to complete it! Why doesn't OpenOffice automatically ...

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Draft finished (Going to sleep on it now... no, not literally...)


May not even be litterally "now", for that matter. I'm not really exhausted, but I could certainly sleep now. Question is whether I can get any useful amount of work done in the hour or so before I really should sleep (pause in here)... I think the sandman will win this argument.

Not particularly satisfied ...

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Are pickles, cookies and yogurt a balanced diet? (Maybe I'm pregnant... oh, wait, I guess that would be a prerequisite... oh, and that too...)


Slow going on the Twisted tutorial. Mostly because there's far too much to say. There's over 25 pages already and I've only just started with the actual Twisted material (the earlier part being discussion of comparable approaches). I've got 15 minutes, so should have approximately 30 pages total... going to be a lot of editing ...

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PyOpenGL Refactored (C APIs for Python modules...)


Spent most of last night learning how to create C APIs for Python modules (it's rather messy when you get right down to it). Basically, instead of a monolithic set of code linked into each PyOpenGL PYD file I'm planning to move all of the extended-API code into a seperate module. Then I'll move the ...

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Simplifications poking up from under the surface (Refactoring is calling...)


As I was reworking the code to do the group statistics last night, I had one of those glimpses of where to go that you look for in a design. A few seconds of clarity when the Platonic ideal of what you're creating pokes through the messy aglomeration that is a working and evolving system. ...

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Sawtooth patterns (Group statistics are this evening's bugbear)


The problem with statistics is that it's often messy to calculate for measurements of the real world. You wind up needing to introduce all sorts of machinery either to artificially create a consistent measurement framework, or to track all the various exceptions and partial contributions so that the final measurement has some relation to what's ...

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Fruitless night chasing performance... (A second or two of gain from 8-1/2 hours work)


Well, I really wasn't in the mood to work on the main project last night (just too keyed up from the 4 or 5 coffees at the management meeting), so I did some housecleaning (the computer kind) and then sat down to try to optimise PySNMP some more.

This package is starting to get a ...

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