Author archives: Mike

RSS feed of Mike

Nginx upload module

Nginx has an upload module (in the nginx-extra package, not in the nginx-full one) that is very nice when you want to allow users to upload large files (think multi-GB video files).  The way it works is that you define a location to which posts may be made where the post may contain an upload. ...

Continue reading

Hyperloop Read-through

So somehow instead of working tonight I found myself reading through the Hyperloop plans from Elon Musk. Basically it's a very-low-pressure, but not true vacuum, steel tube held up on pylons from LA to San Francisco.  Linear accelerators (magnets) push cars through the tube by acting on aluminium blades on the bottom of the cars. ...

Continue reading

Laptop Presentation Fail Take 2

So yesterday we needed to have the participants at the PyCon/Mozilla Maker Party view their videos on the front projector, and the loaner laptops were not happy with the task (many of the projects had 2, sometimes 3 Youtube videos running at the same time in their mashups), so we plugged in my Laptop with ...

Continue reading

Public Service Announcement PyPI "wx" is not what you think...

It is not wxPython you are installing.  It's a "my first module" test package...

So how does one "claim" the top-level namespace module on PyPI when the namespace module is different from the name of the project.  Is there some mechanism to create a redirect from "wx" to "wxPython"?

Py_buffer underwhelms so far

I spent this evening getting the Py_buffer support in PyOpenGL worked through the codebase.  Originally I'd converted the numpy handler to use Py_buffer when in non-accelerated mode, but in the end it didn't provide much of anything other than the occasional "duh" moment where a piece of code assumed that you could treat an output ...

Continue reading

PyOpenGL Py_buffer Support Moving Forward

I've been getting the Py_buffer protocol based format handler for PyOpenGL implemented. The actual handler for buffer-providing types is pretty simple, and the numpy handler is now rewritten into a tiny subclass that just provides a "zeros" method and some "coerce to contiguous" code.  Not yet ready for prime time, and needs accelerator support still, ...

Continue reading

Packaging Ubuntu/Debian is not fun

So I wanted to get Eric4 running on my Ubuntu 13.04 laptop, no problem, the latest Eric4 is compatible, just download the Ubuntu package source, run bzr-merge-upstream and then debuild, right?

No, because Eric4 is a multi-file tar source, where the secondary files (translations) all have binary files that do not play well with the ...

Continue reading

pip/pytz fails with 1.4 and 2013b

We happened to be building a new build server today, and one of the steps in the process is to install packages.  We download all of the packages to local disk in one step (pip install --download ${packages}), then install them in the next step (pip install --no-index --find-links ${packages}).  Thing is, while pytz downloaded ...

Continue reading

Upgrading the Laptop

I finally caved in to the silky sweet seductive tones of Docker. I can't risk the desktop as I need a working machine, but if the laptop is borked I just lose the ability to work away-from-home for a few days. I'm hoping to set up a whole suite of build/test containers.  If it works ...

Continue reading

Create a DKMS DEB for a kernel module

If you have a traditional kernel module, such as the one for the ASIX AX88179 (source code) you may be rather reluctant to install it on your Ubuntu 12.04 machine because it requires re-compilation for every kernel upgrade.  Well, that's what dkms is for, so let's turn that source release into a .deb ...

Continue reading