Archives week 38 of 2004

Was struck this morning by just how cool it is that during this week I've talked directly to the developers working on major pieces of my computing environment. That's the kind of access you only get if you're a Fortune 500 company when you're using Microsoft software.

Think about it, I chatted with the chap ...

Have been having quite a few screaming sessions with the computer over it's insistence on entering a chording-key-entry mode every time I press the control and shift keys together (which I do all the time while editing). Took almost three hours this evening, but I finally tracked down the problem and fixed it.

Turns out ...

Spent quite a few hours today doing debugging on the Mock CMTS code, in the end, it was all bugs in the shims that short-circuit around TwistedSNMP for the testing environment, but I spent far too long spelunking through the code on either side of it (the ping-scanner, which has been running for months, and ...

SVG really needs to get itself set up with automated installers. Sure, IE on Windows gets it easily, but everything else needs more work than it should need. I wound up unable to compile the Java stand-alone SVG viewer (it ran out of memory on a 1GB machine), so I decided to build the Mozilla ...

Now that I have a bash prompt again (see here for that), have seen a huge improvement in my working speed on the Cinemon demo (I'd only managed 8 hours or so on it in almost two days without a prompt, I've typed in the same dratted string hundreds of times because KDE doesn't remember ...

CBC is reporting that the Canadian Union of Public Employees (i.e. our government employees' union) is discussing plans to try to unionise sex-trade workers. Yes, it's a serious issue, but unionising prostitutes as "Public Employees", doesn't that just scream "don't take me seriously"?

Lost the keyboard for a few minutes a while back, was able ...

There's an article in the Christian Science Monitor (no, not one of my normal news-sources, it was picked up by Wired) reviewing the new SUV Hybrid from Ford.

I'm a little fascinated (repelled?) by the "me" focus. Even the "why you're doing it" is basically "so you can feel smug", rather than any real desire ...

Every once in a while someone contacts me to let me know they're using my projects in their projects. Now, I know there are lots of people using some of the projects (e.g. PyOpenGL), but I never really hear from them. I check the download stats on most of my projects, so I have a ...

Finally gave in and did the emerge -e bash... and I'm pretty sure it's not going to work, as it says nothing about replacing the broken gpgme package. Oh well, at least it keeps the computer busy while I work.

Maybe I should create a new category for "whining about Linux".

That said, I seem ...

Been exploring the (largely undocumented) wonders of twisted.manhole (i.e. the twisted interface to a Python shell for debugging that I want to use during the Cinemon demo). I seem to have the server running fine, but I've run into a rather annoying little block; Gentoo doesn't install a telnet client by default, and the windows ...