Archives week 46 of 2004

Before the meeting I spent much of the day working on a presentation for PyGTA next Tuesday. Basically I'm focussing on New Style classes and all the features and implications they have. Particularly focussing on the descriptor API.

I've been using descriptors for a long time now. They are the basis of both OpenGLContext's VRML97 ...

As Tim and I were leaving my place to head to the management meeting I realised that the symptoms Bryan had just described to me (and most of the mysteriously disappearing symptoms from yesterday) would all be explained if the Physical Group watchers were somehow managing to crash silently (i.e. without logging any errors).

When ...

Something in the code introduced to improve the discovery process has managed to produce a failure where the main operations block for too long, causing the zombie watcher to attempt to restart, but it's unable to kill the main process.

Have to figure out a reliable way to force the killing... also need to figure ...

Cinemon was displaying some strange behaviour during discovery, mostly dropping off modems and/or discovering them only after 4 or 5 scans. Haven't been able to isolate the proximate cause yet, but the effect seems to have been fixed.

I hate it when a fix works but I don't know why.

I use the DBAPI's pyformat query format exclusively. It's supported by both the PostgreSQL and MySQL drivers, and it's just a superior mechanism for creating queries (especially with PyTable's SQLQuery class). So, of course, as I was writing the SQLite driver for PyTable I was obviously using pyformat queries.

Problem was, SQLite doesn't support them, ...

SQLite has this annoying habit of reporting all syntax errors with just the text "error preparing statement". That becomes a serious PITA when you're auto-generating huge query strings, but even with the short schema-discovery queries I'm finding it frustrating.

SQLite is a fairly straightforward engine, but it feels far less evolved than PostgreSQL, or even MySQL (which itself feels less evolved than PostgreSQL). It provides a set of "pragma" commands to make it easy to query the current database schema (perform introspection).

The thing about these attempts to make it easier to do ...

Alexei and I used to hang around a lot. What with him moving to China we don't seem to do that any more. He's a renaissance type of person, with a strong focus on the artistic side. He just put up a site showing some of his works. Enjoy it at your leisure, gentle readers.

Didn't wind up having Natasha or Lara come over to grams' place with me, so it was a one-on-one tournament. Of course, grams wound up bragging to all and sundry about how she was going to beat me, so the universe decided to teach her a lesson.

Final score was 4 games to 1 (for ...

How does one go about testing/verifying 183 extensions when one only has 15 or so extensions available on one's graphics card?

Simple, one does not.

I'm going to write a few tests to make sure that the general approach works, but I'm intending to let users who care about particular extensions write tests and submit ...