Archives week 47 of 2004

[This will ramble, I'm just too wired from caffeine to sleep...]

Had dinner this evening with Shiva, Shademan, Rob and Elham. Pleasant dinner, though there were a few conversational threads where I had nothing whatsoever to contribute. The wedding video was playing much of the evening.

Nothing too out-of-the-ordinary up to that point. The thing ...

Cinemon still has a leak somewhere. It's pretty large still, about 6MB/hr. That should exhaust system memory in about two weeks and cause a reboot :( . Much better than 19 hours, but nothing like acceptable (no leak is acceptable). Grr.

Next most likely culprit would be PySNMP's message cache, I suppose. After that, possibly ...

Found a memory leak in how Dispatcher deals with it's back-reference table. Basically it would allow you to replace a registratation of a receiver, but would not remove the replaced receiver's back-references. It also wasn't removing the back-reference when a signal was explicitly disconnected.

Both of those operations are fairly rare, but Cinemon does them ...

I think it's time to move PyOpenGL off of SWIG and on to ctypes. Rene did some preliminary work on this... well... it's a while ago now. The basic C-style API isn't that hard, it's replicating the Pythonic API that causes the problems. It's likely worth the pain just to reduce build problems, the flexibility ...

Think I've gone about as far as I can go without knowing what I'm trying to build for the hotspot project. I put up a quick framework, started filling in page templates with approximately what's needed, but without knowing what business information is needed/wanted, I can't really write the code to go behind the templates. ...

Realised when asked a few days ago that I'd left wxoo sitting right in the middle of a major rewrite. The rewrite was necessitated by the wxPython 2.5 API changes. Those changes were... let's just say "nontrivial", and unfortunately, the new wxPython APIs changed as I was in the middle of doing the upgrade (reversing ...

Decided to give another shot at fixing the wacom tablet in my Gentoo install. I've got a fix, but it's pretty ugly. The problem was that the tablet would, when the pen approached it, start running the cursor along either the left or right side of the screen up and down (very fast). From the ...

Looking at the problem again, it seems obvious that there is a story trying to get through the mess of the presentation;

"Descriptors: from functions to decorators".

That is, a sort of creation myth of the generalisation of the wart/exception in Python 2.1 into a generic, but somewhat difficult to use mechanism in Python 2.2 ...

Got some feedback from John via email. In summary, needed to be designed more, have less information (always one of my problems), and use more anecdotes.

All good points. Doing it again, I'd probably have focused solely on descriptors. Don't know about his preference for story-centred organisation. I tend to come from the "theory first, ...

PyGTA is likely going to relocate to another office around the corner from Givex come January (next meeting), in order to accomodate the larger crowds (it's getting kinda stuffy in the Givex conference room).

The pool hall to which we normally retire is also closing on the 16th of December, so will have to find ...