Category archives: Snaking
Discussions of programming, particularly of programming Python
Very long first day back at work (Tomorrow likely a write-off...)
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Snaking.
Did more work on the last "major feature" for Cinemon on the 1.0 list. Of course, compared to some things on the "minor feature" list, this one has been fairly straightforward (once I remembered to KISS). Along the way I fixed a few bugs, had a few laughs (oh, wait, no, no I didn't), drank ...
What about a "we're ignoring this person, so you may as well block them" service (DDOS protection?)
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Was just struck by this idea. Imagine for a moment that you publish a key in your DNS records which holds a "banning key" (a public-key certificate). Now, when you are writing software to deal with a DDOS, you record the IP addresses which are unambiguously participating in the attack (that's the annoying part with ...
Alive: take 2 (When headaches recede...)
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Vindaloo.
I think I can tentatively declare myself healthy again. The coffee is even reasonable tasting (yesterday it tasted like dishwater). There's still a bit of a throbbing behind one temple, and every few minutes I have the urge to lie down, but all in all I seem to be human again.
Had a flash a ...
Tim's been stolen! (Well, forcibly confined (they even took his shoes!))
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Vindaloo.
Received a plaintive set of emails from our colleague Tim. We've recently been hiring him out as a sort of technical call-guy, sending him off to other people's offices to do whatever weird and warped things the customer wants him to do. All well and good.
Until a trick turns sour.
Poor guy has been ...
Bug steals a day and mocks me unresolved (And somewhere in there I lost a few hours...)
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Vindaloo.
Spent basically the whole day trying to figure out why one of the two CMTSs is reporting huge numbers of offline modems even though you can manually ask any of the offline modems to scan and have it succeed.
It's one of those errors that seems to defy the logic of the application, the scanner ...
First 10 slides finished (Fairly snappy presentation so far...)
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There's a huge difference when you write a presentation to be accompanied by a paper versus one where the presentation is the whole enchilada. The slides are much less crowded, you present just the highest-level points and move on. Not sure whether it's going to markedly change the time per slide.
Anyway, converted all of ...
The day stretches out behind me, merciless and inscrutible (Scorching blacktop I will never drive again...)
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Snaking.
Spent the whole (long) day working on the status display for Cinemon. It was one of those days where you focus on the project so closely that you've lost track of what time it is. You just look up from the code around 9pm and realise "hey, I probably should have eaten something" and then ...
Finally hit my stride on the PyCon presentation (Key is to use paper for designing... you'd think I'd remember that...)
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Snaking,
Vindaloo.
So, instead of sitting in front of the computer and working on the presentation, I printed out the paper (such as it is) and began working on slides as boxes on pieces of paper around key phrases. It's messy, but that's part of the point. I got the bulk of the paper (up to the ...
Were it not for it being virus infested (This is a day I would have booted Windows up just to get the work done...)
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So, more than three hours later, what have I accomplished? Basically nothing, though not for lack of effort. OpenOffice Impress was crashing every 3 or 4 minutes when I had writer open, so I finally decided (two hours ago) that I'd just print the paper out and use that as my reference when working on ...
Finally book a hotel for PyCon (Procrastination is bad, rising hotel rates are worse...)
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Vindaloo.
Got us (at least D'Arcy and I, possibly Ian) a hotel room this morning. All told it's about $1000CDN for the 5-night stay (including everything but parking). That's $100CDN/night for each of us, or around $70USD, which isn't spectacular, but triple occupancy is included in the price, and $66CDN/night is fairly good. I was strongly ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.