Archives week 19 of 2005

Decided to spend a bit of time reviewing Modernist Architecture this evening. It's been a long time and I'm getting very rusty in pulling up names and buildings. Was a good time, basically just touched on Le Corbusier, Mies and started on Gropius. Then I happened to click on a link on a trivial little ...

The portabello mushrooms were the same price as the plain-old white mushrooms at the market. Yay! Having a few people over to celebrate :) . Haven't done anything else productive yet this weekend. Though I suppose the nap from which I just woke was useful in some way.

The default ctypes auto-generated wrappers are really quite expensive, so I wanted to rework them. Luckily the entire function-generating operation is a single overridable method. The methods now look like this:

Working on the ctypes wrappers some more this evening. Spent some time making the code generate names for the arguments. Got deeper and deeper into that until I realised I was considering rewriting the whole generation engine... that's generally a bad sign.

So, back up a little and look at something else. Realised that pydoc ...

Spent the first half of the day installing the demo on the laptop. Lot of headaches with PostgreSQL until I decided to install the native (instead of the CYGWIN) version. The last half of the day was spent dealing with stupid little bugs in the live systems. Lot of annoying junk. Worse, it's still going ...

So, after another extended day, went to the UU meeting to see Bryan and pick up the laptop. It's an IBM X31 ThinkPad with a busted screen, so I have to connect it to my monitor, making it entirely non-portable. Luckily, Steve Holden gave me a switch and cables for sharing a monitor at PyCon, ...

Since I couldn't sleep, decided to build a wrapper to create an OpenGL context for testing the new ctypes-based code. Simple enough with PyGame, just import, init and set the mode and we're off to the races. Found a few small bugs when the code started running, and enhanced the error reporting a little, but ...

So, for the second day, I work 9+ straight hours w/out a break other than to grab more coffee and cookies. Sitting here at the end of that, with my hands chutneyed, and my eyes blurring from fatigue I suddenly think "why?"

It's nice that the test suite is running again. It's nice that the ...

Spent the bulk of the day on two projects. The first was eliminating stalls in the scanning process where the scanner is processing huge numbers of modems. Previously I was using a batching mechanism (actually, multiple batching mechanisms) that was (were) rather fragile and required lots of testing for each mechanism.

Started off looking for ...

The audio recording for my PyCon 2005 talk is available now. The pre-slides-coming-back stuff wasn't as bad as I'd feared, in fact, I prefer it to the stuff after the slides appearing, especially as there's a lot of dead air where I'm wrestling with the computer rather than talking to the audience.

There's nothing recorded ...