Category archives: Snaking

Turns out that the "wacom" kernel module in 2.6 kernels is actually just one of about 5 modules you need to load. With all of them loaded, and some xorg.conf settings copied from a howto, the tablet is again "working" under xorg. However, it still has that annoying habit of getting stuck about 10-20 pixels ...

So, after this evening's "real" work, I decided once again to try to install Gentoo, but this time I went whole-hog and built with the actual 64-bit architecture (which is far less extensively tested than the 32-bit version). Also decided to use the Gentoo reference platform (GRP) to get the bulk of the compiling done ...

Left Gentoo last night compiling xorg-x11 (the base windowing system for Linux machines). About 5 in the morning I wake up to find that the dratted thing has stopped with exactly the same errors-in-gcc's-linker that the wipe-and-recreate were supposed to fix.

Tried to boot back into Windows, and it was giving blue-screens-of-death every time. Pulled ...

I'm up to the stage where one builds the kernel in the latest Gentoo install. Probably 4 hours wasted trying to get Knoppix to work as the hosting/building environment.

For some silly reason it kept losing my USB keyboard and mouse. After I switched both to PS/2 connectors that problem was solved, but then the ...

Switched back to the web-"spidering" application yesterday, a few more hours of work today on it. This is really just a web-checking engine that goes out and sees if any of a few tens of thousands of pages have changed in the last day or so and reports the results.

Nothing really complex there, but ...

I use PyTable fairly extensively (actually exclusively) when I'm working with databases. Today, however, I've come up against a limitation that I've long known to exist, but have never before had a reason to fix. Makes for a rather slow hacking day I'm afraid.

In particular, PostgreSQL has a feature which defines distinct namespaces for ...

I am almost to the point of saying "screw it" and rebuilding the entire Gentoo install. At the least it will give me a chance to practice my backup/restore skills under Linux. So I am currently downloading the CD images for both the generic i686 and the Athlon64 versions.

I figure I'll try the Athlon64 ...

Wound up getting two coffee's at the pool hall this evening, so I'm a bit wired. Sounds like the perfect time to try Gentoo again. How many times am I going to rebuild this dratted system I wonder to myself... oh well, maybe it'll build character.

The secret: twisted.web.client.getPage(url) handles SSL (https://) protocols automatically. Nothing I could find in the documentation mentions that. There are references to the ContextFactory, but nothing is mentioned about whether you need to pass one in or not (you don't). So, a simple script to download an SSL page with Twisted looks something like this:

from ...

Tim came by and we discussed the EFT server project for an hour or so (I am so not looking forward to that project now). After that we switched to discussing the MediaCorp page-checker project, much better specified (i.e. at least minimally specified).

Spent a solid 7 hours on that, with the result being a ...