Archives week 20 of 2005

Was chatting this evening with a friend. She's one of those people who are pretty close to perfect; sweet, gentle, intelligent, funny, curious, and actively improving herself all the time. Felt quite trollish in comparison. What am I doing to pursue my dreams? What have I learned in the last few years? Am I a ...

Having a birthday party for Shane this evening. Result is that I'm not going to get any more work done on the OpenGL ctypes wrapper. Last night I fixed a few problems with the pointer-setting mechanism, and began breaking out the platform-specific code into separate modules. Spent quite a bit of time trying to figure ...

Finally tracked down the hanging Twisted code. It was a big operation that happens every 20 minutes. The first time through every operation has to wait for a network connection or 2, so there's always a deferred. Subsequent times none of the (3000+) operations has to wait, but they are very heavy in terms of ...

In response to my queries about how to catch a hanging application, James posted this wonderful little snippet of code:

import signal, pdb, sys
from twisted.internet import task

def timeout(*args):
  sys.stderr.write("SIGALRM timeout, breaking into debugger.\n")
  import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, timeout)

task.LoopingCall(signal.alarm, 10).start(1)

The reason that works is that the alarm call cancels all previous alarm ...

Okay, so I've turned on trackback moderation to keep that from happening again. Still means I'll have to click "delete" hundreds of times, but at least they won't get anything out of it. I get so few legitimate trackbacks it's not a huge loss to have them have a delay before publishing.

Incidentally; die, spammers, ...

Spambayes is just sitting there, beckoning me. The idea is that you would configure a Hammie instance as a Zope object pointing to an on-disk database (to avoid balooning the ZODB). You would train on all comments in your blog (assuming you have only good comments), then train on any spam that comes in.

The ...

I know my dreams generally bore others; so won't describe them. Just note that last night was full of dreams of cleaning and clearing out, of moving forward and fixing broken things that are impeding progress.

There was also some point where I was composing poetry... not sure if I was awake or asleep at ...

Spent the bulk of yesterday on various marketing tasks, reviewing and rewriting the product introduction, recreating screenshots in higher resolutions, finalising the demo install for the San Antonio conference.

The annoying part is that I didn't really enjoy it. Normally I love doing marketing-type work, it's a design discipline, after all. This time I just ...

For some strange reason the /var/run/mysqld directory wound up with incorrect permissions to allow the user mysql to write to it. Neither the mysqld or mythbackend init.d scripts caught the failure, so the machine was sitting with neither service running for the better part of a day (since I rebooted fairly early this morning to ...

Comes right down to it, I didn't produce anything this weekend. I once again sat down to work on my examination of Modernist Architecture and once again had to stop when I realised that I needed to read more. Read more, but didn't get back to the writing. Kinda felt like talking to <elided> this ...