Category archives: Snaking

So you want to create a stupid-and-dirty HTML5 video tag to allow you to monitor a (local-only) multicast stream from your (Django + Nginx) web site?  Not something to be seen by "real people", but a way for you to see if anything is broadcasting?

This is a pretty simplistic thing, again; do *not* do ...

So we want to capture the (alsa) output of processes and pipe it into an mpeg-ts stream.  Except gstreamer's alsasrc can't do "monitor", so we wind up having to do a pulsesrc... which brings the server to its knees in a few minutes with memory exhaustion for no reason I can fathom.

Annoying part is ...

Each time I sit down to help someone relatively new to coding I find myself somewhat awe-struck at how much I've "forgotten".  Just install nginx with gunicorn and django in a virtualenv.  Package up your code with a setup.py using distribute.  Run your unittests with Nose.  Use sphinx and embedded doctests.

You tell someone that ...

In one of those cases where you ask a question, don't get an answer, then spend far longer than you intended playing with the problem, I've just added a Pipe mechanism to Fussy (why to fussy, you ask? Well because that's where I wanted to use it).  Basically it provides a small wrapper around subprocess ...

Just stumbled across the OpenGL Samples Pack, which is a bunch of OpenGL sample code for advanced features... exactly the kind of thing I need to test if I've got PyOpenGL working... of course, they're written in C, but it's way easier to translate from C to Python than to come up with dozens ...

http://readthedocs.org/docs/2daypython/

and you can branch and alter/adapt the source (in restructured text) as you wish using:

bzr branch lp:2daypython

One thing that seemed ...

As mentioned a while ago, I was looking for a firmware packager that would allow for "user uploads a signed bundle" style upgrades for hardware devices.  Esky is similar (even a similar on-disk layout), but focused on cross-platform and distutils-based "application" setup.  Fussy is intended for "core of a system" setups, where the entire user ...

Query came up on PyOpenGL-dev this morning about how to handle GLchar pointer arguments.  These are binary-specified arguments, they are human-readable text *most* of the time, ascii source-code and identifiers, that kind of thing, but nothing about GLchar pointer requires that they be ascii.  They *are* 8-bit character strings (that's what GLchar pointer means).

But ...

I'm wondering if this package exists, preferably in Python (well, I *know* it exists, as I wrote it for a commercial project, and can't use it any more.  I'm hoping there's an Open Source version I can enhance for future use):

• bundle a .tar.gz (signed, optionally encrypted) for delivery to embedded platforms
• on platform, decrypt ...

Spent the afternoon at Research in Action (at University of Toronto).  Highlights:

• big classical (i.e. right out of the textbook) neural network used for road detection in satellite imagery; okay results, huge amounts of computing power involved; not sure it's really all that much better than a hand-coded solution, but it did seem to work ...