Category archives: Snaking

The machine with the little switch hanging off it is basically all old hardware. Unfortunately, the CD-ROM seems to work only for the first 2 or 3 minutes that the machine is up, just enough to boot Knoppix 3.3, but not Knoppix 3.4, and just enough to start booting Gentoo (then it starts getting I/O ...

As some of you will undoubtedly remember, I haven't been having stellar luck with the hardware I ordered from TigerDirect. The CPU cooler doesn't seem to be properly cooling the Athlon64 (though I seem to have got it to the point where it's stable and reliable, though still 10 degrees warmer than it really should ...

After visiting grams (score 3 games to 1 IIRC), spent another few hours playing with the demo "world" for OpenGLContext. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get the shadows to bake properly in OpenGLContext, but here's the current state (I'm about to switch back to work-work, so this is where it'll stay for approximately another 2 ...

One of the things that OpenGLContext really needs is a little demo of what it can do. Unfortunately, though there was a gentleman's agreement that I could use my design work with VRTelecom for reasonable personal use, that wouldn't include dropping it into a package that hundreds of people are going to recieve.

So, I ...

Since I missed the last meeting I'm rather looking forward to this one. Peter's going to do a presentation on his robotic interface. You can find more information on the wiki. As usual, we'll try to have time for general questions and discussion of Python news.

Spent the day working with SimpleParse. The easy part was defining a grammar, took maybe an hour. After that the annoying work of building the interpreter began. It was annoying because I realised that there is a fundamental flaw in my plan for this sub-project, namely, I'm not forcing the user to differentiate between objects ...

Seem to be finished the hierarchy discovery conversion (I'm sure there's still missing parts, but it seems to work). Now I get to integrate the actual steady-state scanning code (which has been running for a month or two) with it. After that I do the loading of location data, then the archiving/statistics machinery.

All of ...

Full-featured databases tend to have low-level locking mechanisms such that if a particular thread or client has modified a row in one transaction, then attempts to reference that row in other transactions are blocked. When your database interface (e.g. PyPgSQL) doesn't allow for sharing transactions between threads, you can (when a problem occurs) wind up ...

When you wind up back-modifying large-ish bodies of code to work in entirely new ways, you wind up with a lot of areas where the fit isn't wonderful. In this case, the ping scanner was written with the assumption that the entire hierarchy was coming from database, and so therefor every operation could rely on ...

Just seems insane to me that people can get patents on what are essentially just ideas. It should not be possible to patent "using a computer + network to do x", yet that's what's being done. It should not be possible to patent basic mathematics or algorithms, yet we allow it. And every time we ...