Archives 2011

You don't need to be an expert on something.  It doesn't need to be something obscure.

Talk about how to use a debugger effectively.  Talk about how using a debugger is a crutch for those too weak to use TDD.  Talk about how TDD is a crutch for those too insecure about their code to ...

Since updating to Ubuntu 11.04, my Thinkpad has, at long last, been able to resume.  Unfortunately, it has also suffered lots of X crashes/hangs from KDE software.  That's kinda frustrating, so I decided to try updating to KDE 4.7 on 11.04, to see if that was more stable.  Unfortunately, the machine is back to never ...

Ran into a little problem today that requires being able to see what timezones (of the Linux-ish America/Toronto, America/Montreal variety) are equivalent to one another.:

#! /usr/bin/env python
"""Stupid little script to find equivalent timezones"""
import pytz, pprint, pickle, datetime
all_timezones = [pytz.timezone(name) for name in pytz.all_timezones]
def search():
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    set = {} ...

Django model forms are already easy.  How could they be easier?

@decorators.with_X( request, model_class, key, url_field, parameter, required=True )
def my_view( parameter ):

We also use decorators that do x.y lookup on another parameter (i.e. lookup a particular object in the fields of another object based on ids (root_object.field.get( id=...))).  Sure, it winds up hitting ...

PyDispatcher is one of those projects that's been in "just works" mode for a long time which needs to be updated to work on Python 3.x if I'm going to be able to test much of my software there.  PyDispatcher is the glue that keeps OpenGLContext/PyVRML97 together.  It's also the ancestor of the Django signals ...

By popular demand (well, one user so far), I've added rudimentary support for window state storage to RunSnakeRun.  There's lots more state that could be stored, but for now it just stores the window position, size and maximization.  Should be considered an alpha-level feature for now, as it is untested on Win32 or OSX. ...

Have just released this release.  Not a lot of new features, though there are a number of bug fixes and a lot of new extensions, including the OpenGL 4.2 ARB modules.  Particularly need testers with Win32 and OSX.

Customer asked me to look at a 2.5 based project yesterday.  No problem, just fire up my virtualenv and take a quick look.  Hrm, no, the virtualenv isn't working... Python 2.5 isn't installed.  Hrm, and it's not in the apt repository for Natty.  Hrm... okay, build from source... fail on sqlite... debug... patch... build succeeds. ...

I wanted to test PyOpenGL under 3.2 (using 2to3), but my entire test-suite is written in OpenGLContext, which is dependent on many other libraries (numpy, pydispatcher, pyvrml97, fonttools, ttfquery, simpleparse, etceteras).  So, since I want to test, let's see how easy it is to convert the SimpleParse-pure project (written to test pypy speed) into a ...

Got the GLE DLL built using VC9 (a.k.a. 2008), and a mechanism in place to load the GLE DLL based on which version of Python you are running (unfortunately, I don't see a good hook to check for the vcX version to use that to decide which DLL to load.  In theory someone might compile ...