Archives January 2007

WPA setup under Linux is way too complex (It shouldn't take hours for each computer...)


We run our home/office access point in WPA encrypted mode. This is, AFAIK the only reasonably secure protocol available in the common Linksys WRT* routers.

It works very well on my Gentoo laptop using madwifi (and has worked well for quite a while now). Took a bit of fiddling, probably 4 or 5 hours, but ...

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Pause before unleashing the fix (What have I messed up...)


About to run the fix-up script for an error that's about 1.5 weeks old now. The script generates 337 emails to customers, alters the database in 4 or 5 ways and generally has all sorts of ways in which it could screw up in very public and end-customer-annoying ways.

I've just run a test run ...

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Another try at Sugar (Try Qemu when I get a chance)


Going to attempt to set up a Sugar development environment. The Gentoo installation stuff doesn't work any more (everything is masked out due to bugs/instability now). Apparently it'll run in a Qemu environment that allows for development work. Might be a workable solution if I can mount a directory into the image from the workstation. ...

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Gigabytes of comment spam (Annoying blaggards...)


Tim tells me that the ZODB (Zope Object Database) in which this blog is housed has grown to 12GB, largely composed of enormous amounts of comment spam. He's looking at how to shrink it down to something reasonable, but if that's the kind of spamming rate we're seeing we're going to need some way to ...

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This week was just too long (Treading water...)


My plan last Wednesday was to get a given feature finished, have the customer review it on Thursday and then do some polishing. Various factors killed my productivity on Wednesday and Thursday (much of it being an aborted attempt to create the "right" system instead of the "right now" system). Still, woke up Friday planning ...

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I hate it when problems "fix themselves" (Hard to guard against reoccurance that way...)


I spent most of yesterday and half of today trying to track down a bug in email sending from the billing system. We hadn't changed any code, but were suddenly seeing duplicate emails. Spent ages trying to find something wrong with the code, eventually just had to assume it was a system-level problem.

So, plaintive ...

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Moving StarPy discussions to the mailing list (Formalizing communications)


Since there are more people using it and there are people wanting to share experiences and/or discuss usage we should use a mechanism that's a little more community oriented. In that vein, I'll try to switch to using the StarPy-users discussion list for most discussions of the library. Probably still post little snippets here once ...

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Just about ready for a new PyOpenGL release (About time...)


Spent today on PyOpenGL. Got the nurbs code working for most of the demos. Cleaned up the GLU module implementation as I was doing that. Started work on the documentation, first updating the main page and then beginning work on the auto-generated documentation.

Good news is that the documentation generation process no longer requires so ...

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I like my father (Loving the Universe...)


Dad has a great post up from a few days ago.

Whiskered warrior
No, say defender
Facing dark forces
On unkempt walls
Holding off demons
With soft words
Of hard wisdom
As the day fades

Fighting darkness
With each word
Hoping light
Will carry on
Without him
That his battle
Will help someone
See the ...

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Refactoring fatigue setting in (Upgrade scripts making me sick...)


I'm continuing to refactor the ISP/VoIP billing system as I add new features. Spent most of today working on a state-table based sub-system... sometime around 11pm I started writing yet another upgrade script (in the infinite series of upgrades scripts that is my life) and realised I should just back off half the changes again. ...

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