Lee on March 22nd, 2009

Seems ABC have approved the pilot for a remake of ‘V’ (a great 1980’s sci-fi mini-series, for those who don’t know). I watched it again a year or so back, and it actually held up pretty well.
So… in the tradition of remakes, this could either be a great update of a classic, adding more [...]

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Lee on March 17th, 2009

The UK Intellectual Property Organisation (being one of those governmental organisations which I’m ashamed to have associated with my country), is conducting a so-called consultation on the future of IP, and the forming of a new so-called Digital Rights Agency. This seems to be a further step based on Digital Britain Report.
What they seem [...]

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Lee on March 16th, 2009

I’ve been slowly upgrading my understanding of complex math lately, by working (in python) through stuff on Project Euler and betterexplained, etc. I just discovered the derivations package in Debian. It’s a book of applied math proofs, styled after K&R’s The C Programming Language’s logical progression and easy reference (K&R’s TCPL is a [...]

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Lee on March 14th, 2009

Hmm. Qt’s kinetic is pretty cool. Of course, Amigas could easily do something very similar back in the 80’s (with BOBs), but it’s a big step forward for more “modern” systems

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This is going to be a slightly cheesed off post. Better skip it if you’re not thick-skinned. Back to happier django posts soon… if I can forgive this.
So I’m deploying my first real django app to a live server, with modwsgi. ModWSGI itself isn’t great, as it insists on a single python [...]

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Lee on March 11th, 2009

So I upgraded my desktop to 6GB recently (from 2GB), mainly for virtual machines, but also just because I hate virtual memory. That necessitated switching to full-time use of an AMD64 edition. Up to then, I’d been jumping back and forth trying different combinations of 64-bit OS and 64-/32-bit apps, given [...]

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Lee on March 9th, 2009

Aaron Toponce posted some interesting “libraries of congress” analogies about the size of the IPv6 address space. I loved how he said that “18,446,744,073,709,551,616…may not look large” compared to the (less than) 2^32 addresses available in IPv4 — he seems to think about future compatibility in the same way I do
Anyway, I [...]

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Lee on March 8th, 2009

It seems that Python 3.1 alpha 1 has been released already. A quick scan of the NEWS file reveals some nice performance improvements in there:

IO stuff reimplemented in C
new garbage collector
faster Unicode handling
computed gotos (which I’ve never heard of, but apparently offers 20% speedup on supported compilers)

Things like this keep shocking me in python’s [...]

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Lee on March 8th, 2009

I seem to be in a love/hate relationship with Git. On the one hand, it’s… well, horrible, usability wise, with all it’s unexpected behaviors and weird terminology for well known concepts. On the other hand, it does nice things like this when changes are committed:


rename noodil.py => kit_library/hello.py (71%)
mode change 100755 => 100644
rewrite [...]

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Lee on March 6th, 2009

Hmm. Chrome-center has an article up performance of VIA Chrome chips on windows and Linux for Nexuiz, with pretty charts showing that Nexuiz runs faster on Linux. I think this is way off.
For one thing, the Xorg and video driver guys are busy re-writing the entire Linux video stack because it’s entirely out [...]

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