Author Archive

The Girl Next Door

Went out with a couple friends last night. Was one of those situations where you have to deal with movie selection. As you might expect that can be difficult. Ignoring the movie one person has already seen (Bourne Supremacy) and everyone else wants to see. Finding the movies that nobody has seen, but not including the movie (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) that one person particular doesn’t want to see.

That sorted we ended up going to seeing The Girl Next Door. Surprising it was enjoyable. Slightly different take of romantic comedy. So many moments where it could have gone all bad, but enough twists to keep you satisfied. As per usual with Hollywood, its important to suspend belief.

I’d say if you seen all the other good movies and you want to have a fun night out, its definitely worth the movie ticket.

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Propoganda

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Slashdot | Delta Compression for Linux Security Patches?

Don’t you hate it when you have to download a 50Mb openoffice.org deb, just because the developer has changed one line in debian/*. I think someone some work on a binary patch system not just for security releases but for all updates.

Work on the principle subversion uses. DIskspace is cheap and bandwidth is expensive.

While we are at it the other thing Debian needs is mastermerge.

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pgLOGd

pgLOGd is a nice similar system for logging apache entries to postgres.

Now to find a decent php or python based log analyser, then hack it to use pgLOGd.

Update: This guy has a nice analysis of log analysers tools: Log Analyzer. Before I saw this though I pretty much figured that AWStats was the way to go.

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Cat Doors

Time to get a cat door and get rid of the hole under the house the cats have been using up until now.

These guys look like they have the best selection: The Cat Door Company and this door looks the best. We definitely need some sort of the controlled entry door here as the cat density in our area exceeds the human density. The question is though, will our 16 year old cat Grey like wearing a collar.

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Permanent Lenses in Sight

Here is an option for those of us who aren’t sure if LASIK is the way to go: Permanent Lenses in Sight.

I’m wondering if in a few years time, this might be a method to implant electronic eyes.

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Starting some development work:- wxPython vs Python web

I’m in the process of developing a small application for stock purchase management. Basically logistics handling for purchasing containers from an overseas supplier, dealing with some forecasting for supply cycles. Few basic things.

I haven’t really done much development work a very long time, so I’m a bit rusty. I decided that I’m going to write it in python, as after looking at some of my old perl programs I realise how important it is to be able to maintain your applications even six months down the track. So I think its probably a good change to learn some python and see if its works for me. I’m quite interested in the statement I constantly have heard: “I sat down to try test some ideas and had my application written over the weekend.”

The question I’m now faced with though what UI to use. Should it be web based or maybe wxPython? Problem is when you are writing something not for yourself to use, but other users that you have to make sure that its robust and finding debugs is not going to make you hair go grey.

I gave SPE a try last week and quite liked it. I was almost ready to buy wingware, but SPE seems somewhat better. I had a play in the windows version with its interface to wxGlade. It looked very powerful, I’m figuring it might take me about a couple learning how to put basic single window applications together and maybe another ten or so, put it all together in a multi-window application.

On the web side, as many people know that are a lot of different choices for python web applications frameworks. I still have to write the data model and I’ll probably try wxPython out, but a web application is easier to deploy and upgrade, and I’m a lazy admin.

I’ve been compiling a list of references:

Still a bit of work to do.

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Strang on Video

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Jogin.com :: Tables

Nice tale about designing two sites, one with tables vs the other with css layouts.

Interesting commentry afterwards with a reference to a nice quick introduction to Developing With Web Standards.

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TCP window scaling and broken routers

Something to be aware of when you upgrade to 2.6.8.1, TCP window scaling and broken routers:

In the 2.6.7 kernel, the default scale factor is zero; in Linus’s BitKeeper tree and the 2.6.7-mm kernels, instead, it has been increased to seven. This change has brought the broken router behavior to light; suddenly people running current kernels are finding that they cannot talk to a number of systems out there. One of the higher-profile affected sites is packages.gentoo.org. Gentoo users are, unsurprisingly, not pleased.

In the mean time, anybody running a current kernel who is having trouble connecting to a needed site can work around the problem with a command like:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_default_win_scale

or by adding a line like:

net.ipv4.tcp_default_win_scale = 0

to /etc/sysctl.conf.

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