Archives 2004

When I raise error messages I default to being verbose, I'll tend to format the error in such a way that even if it were to show up where a user could see it, it would be somewhat intelligible (or so I tell myself).

However, the SNMP storage mechanism is doing this type of reporting ...

Came back from the meeting to find hundreds of processes running on cmon, with complete memory exhaustion and hundreds of alert messages in my inbox. I'd decided earlier in the day to try running both the old (heavy) scanner and the demo scanner at the same time... stupid of me.

The load-levels were in the ...

Implemented crude throttling (twice) for Cinemon during the first 7 hours of the day. The first time I implemented it based on the idea that I could take the difference in time between when I scheduled an event to occur and the time it actually occured within Twisted.

That worked... sort-of. The problem is that ...

Shane suggested going out for coffee instead of him dropping in to my place, so I actually left the apartment! I need to get out far more often than I do. We spent a couple of hours hanging out in the Starbucks. Lara dropped in maybe half an hour before they closed too.

The little ...

Spent the evening working on icons for Cinemon. Unfortunately, the standardised icons are rather... ahem... dull. They look like they were intended for use on black-and-white wiring diagrams, rather than full colour interactive maps. I really feel the desire to tweak them to return to the beauty of the all-circle diagrams of the past... but ...

Thinking, from now on, I should always code a catcher-of-last-resort first when working on a project. That is, a script that stands outside the long-running application and pings it every X seconds to make sure it's alive, and if it isn't, forces a restart.

We need to upgrade the hardware for Cinemon, particularly the RAM ...

Well, actually, I slept a great deal too. Fixed two longstanding bugs in OpenGLContext, one in the handling of textured-transparent geometry and the other in handling commonly malformed geometry (degenerate faces in IndexedFaceSets).

Tomorrow (after visiting grams) I'm planning on spending the day on something more VexTech-ish... probably PySNMP, maybe PyTable.

For now I'm going ...

Just got off the phone with Natasha. She's working on a document (while sick, no less) describing aspects of consciousness in Victorian literature. Neat thing is, it mirrors the debate about whether one can know another's consciousness save through the reports of that individual about their consciousness (and the rebuttal that even when you look ...

By now I'm somewhat accustomed to the... shall we say "meagre" documentation available for Twisted, but this instance is just weirdly under-documented. Normally there's at least one piece of sample code that uses a feature, but I can't find anything that uses the Nevow "sequence" feature. The idea is something like this:

I was asked to explain my understanding of superstring theory (such as it is) on the weekend, particularly the aspect where there is a fundamental limit to the size of objects, that is, why there can be a string, but nothing below a string.

If I'm understanding correctly, what happens is that to get down ...