Author archives: Mike

Spent the afternoon at Research in Action (at University of Toronto).  Highlights:

• big classical (i.e. right out of the textbook) neural network used for road detection in satellite imagery; okay results, huge amounts of computing power involved; not sure it's really all that much better than a hand-coded solution, but it did seem to work ...

One of the nice new features in Django 1.4 is that it allows you to (easily) detect an upstream server's use of ssl using request.is_secure().  This means that your nginx configuration can use http or https on the same server and your Django site can detect it.  The magic is accomplished by *always* setting a ...

Say you want to target audio to one of N (virtual) devices in ALSA for a tree of processes.  That is, you want to say "hey, all you lot, play out channels 2 and 3 of the sound card as though they were a separate card" and then tell another set of processes to do ...

I'm trying to code up a service that needs to auto-play presentations (mostly Powerpoint).  Users (who may not be at all technically savvy) need to be able to upload the files and have them advance regardless of whether they have properly specified auto-play settings (if they *have* set the advance properly, we want to respect ...

I'm sure there must be a really nice packaging of this, but so far all I've found is example projects that don't quite do what I'd want... so here's the basic setup; you have a Django model with File fields that you want to convert to using JQuery File Upload.  For now, we'll assume you ...

If you need PIL in your custom Python 2.6 build (your build needs to be custom if you want to target LTS Ubuntu Server's default Python while working on a more recent Ubuntu), you will likely find your PIL build doesn't work (because, of course, you have a 64-bit build of Ubuntu and the libraries ...

As mentioned a few times, Matt Davis and I taught the Python section of the Software Carpentry Boot Camp this past week.  Overall the experience was positive.  We had approximately 4 (stretched to 5) hours, and developed our own curriculum with a fairly strong narrative.  Almost every exercise focused on a task, taking a CSV ...

Matt Davis and I are going to teach the Software Carpentry session on Python tomorrow at University of Toronto.  Pretty happy with how the collaboration worked so far.  We loaded a bzr repository into Dropbox then both branched the (local) repository, pushing, rebasing etc on our file:/// urls.  We got pretty-much instance notices when things ...

Sitting down and playing with "what needs to be in the box" for OpenGLContext 3.0 (the most boring working title I can come up with). Time constraints suggest I'll have to do a migration rather than a re-implementation, so the name is probably apt.  The GUI-library integration is fine, the scenegraph engine, node-paths, matrix calculation, ...

(Read that in Robin Williams' Genie Voice) A project I used to work on has been informed by certain rabbit-mq types that they should not send messages > 15KB on a RabbitMQ server because it would "chew up all the subscription threads and limit throughput"... which... wow, dropped off a robustness/scalability/credibility cliff there.