Category archives: Snaking

Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python

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Drawing graphs with SVG (Using SVGdraw.py)


So, one of the goals for this stage of development is to provide higher-level overviews of the data, including graphical views. After spending a few hours looking at the various C-library charting solutions, I'm beginning to favour just creating the graphics as SVG vector images using a very lightweight library called SVGdraw. That will ...

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Where are the radical ideas in computer science? (Radical is not adding functional elements to Python, for instance...)


Here, for instance, is a radical (but not particularly new) idea in computer language design:

The computer records all interactions with the programmer and shares it's understandings of meanings and implications of any given set of events/contexts with all other computers in the system.

With every spare bit of processing and communications power, the computer ...

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Stupid combination of otherwise trivial problems (No network access, local postgresql database unable to restore)


So today's primary development requirement was to compile the group history into a readily-used form for doing back-history tracking. Unfortunately, Roger's cable seems to be having some difficulties, and local PostgreSQL refuses to load the database dump from the live system. Major PITA.

So, network's back up now, but I'm tired and have to get ...

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Little tweaks and fixes (A day with little big to show for it...)


Sure, it's only 1/2 over, but so far it looks like this day is mostly just little bookkeeping fixes, interface tweaks, cleaning up after introducing stricter semantics for ESN fields, that kind of thing. Still no word from the customer, so still no idea if this approach is worthwhile for the UI or not. Hopefully ...

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Catspaw (References to names you think you should know...)


Saw a link in a blog entry today to "Catspaw", which for some reason seemed like a familiar name to me. She's apparently the same woman from UofT who wrote this paper, which I read when it first came out, but that doesn't refer to her as Catspaw.

She also appears to be ...

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Well, that feels better (Though I could really use some sleep now)


Just did a significant amount of refactoring to pull all the collection-editing code into one place. Seems to have all worked out. Now, however, I must sleep again (I had a nap earlier). Oh, there's new releases of BasicProperty/BasicTypes and PyTable for those who are interested.

It's all a plot (The computers are watching us and *laughing*)


Well, after all that work last night, the dratted group statistics still aren't working for one CMTS (though they are working for the other four). Going to just load the darn thing and use pdb to debug it.

I'm always kind of surprised just how well pdb works for poking at complex systems (e.g. Zope ...

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Yes, I'm still here... (Sigh.)


Well, going on for 19 hours in the day so far, the last 10 hours of that being an exercise in frustration. Turns out an optimisation of the tracking archiver was causing a problem. I'd reduced the set of records it was loading to an easily queried sub-set, letting all other records be found by ...

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Beginning to sag a little (But new weight-level might help)


Evening has been mostly frustration, and I'm beginning to lose my drive to continue. Finally (I think) got the group-statistics summaries working, but I've discovered 3 or 4 show-stopper bugs in the process (that darn PostgreSQL hang being the biggest one).

On a more interesting note (well, for me), I finally moved up to 20lbs ...

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