Schinckel.net

I’m teaching Information Technology Studies to final year High School students this year, and one of the topics I am teaching is Application Programming. I’d prefer to stay away from Visual Basic if possible, and I’m re-investigating currently available GUI construction methods for python. Back in the 90s, I was involved in the anygui project, which was a lofty plan to create a GUI equivalent to the anydbm interface that python uses for accessing the most easily available database backend. I’m not talking SQL or Access, but simpler database stores like bsddbm and the like. This project never reached fruition, although we got lots of code sorted out. One of the alternatives that I find really exciting seems to be an intellectual successor to this project: ClaroGraphics. This goes even further, having the plan to be a GUI library for C, C++, python, ruby, anything. I’m not sure that it will be feature complete by the time I get to it (second term), but it most certainly looks exciting. It may be that I’m better of sticking with EasyGUI, which is a non-event driven GUI system, which basically allows for dialogs and interaction using a GUI, rather than having to use text. This could be a goer, I’ll have to check that out too. An alternative might be to use Eclipse, with Jython. That allows for python syntax, but cross-platform GUI Java style. I think. More research needed.

From the Synergy FAQ:

How do I stop my game from minimizing when I leave the screen? Many full screen applications, particularly games, automatically minimize when they’re no longer the active (foreground) application on Microsoft Windows. The synergy server normally becomes the foreground when you switch to another screen in order to more reliably capture all user input causing those full screen applications to minimize. To prevent synergy from stealing the foreground just click “Options…” and check “Don’t take foreground window on Windows servers.” If you turn this on then be aware that synergy may not function correctly when certain programs, particularly the command prompt, are the foreground when you switch to other screens. Simply make a different program the foreground before switching to work around that.

If you haven’t been there before, you must go to xkcd.com, and read all of his comics. Most of them are excellent, some are truly magnificent. Randall really seems to hit the spot, focussing on nerdity, and pointing out how amusingly stupid many of the things we do and say are.

I’ve found what might be a reproducible bug in Lightroom b4, but I haven’t done enough investigating to pionpoint it exactly. What’s going wrong is if I Export as a Binder, from my Mac, and try to import it on the PC, if it’s more than a certain number of levels of depth of Shoots, the import fails. I don’t know exactly how many levels, or if the problem is with the import or export. But it’s annoying, as I can’t just export the whole library as a binder and then import it into my existing library… instead I have to break it up into segments.

I reformatted my file server, and installed OpenSlug on it (much faster than LinkSys firmware, I’ve noticed), and when I was setting up the Samba shares, I thought I’d be a clever bastard, and outsmart the Finder. See, when you access a directory, or copy files using the Finder, and you are copying to a non-HFS disk, it creates a file ._Filename.ext that stores meta-data, the new version of the Resource Fork, for all of you old-school Mac heads. So, I thought, if I use: veto files = /._*/.DS_Store/ then I won’t have any problems with these files littering up the directory structure. But, this won’t work. It doesn’t allow for the creation of these files, which causes the Finder to choke: Removing the veto (I moved it into hide files, which should prevent other clients from seeing them) fixed the problem. For search engines, the text of the dialog box is:

You cannot copy some of these items to the destination because their names are too long or contain invalid characters for the destination. Do you want to skip copying these items and continue copying the other items?

It took me quite a while to figure out why this was happening…

Tennis Australia plays with domain ‘scalper’ - Internet Applications Software

Tennis Australia paid a “hefty fee” to the Sydney-based group, but less than a six-figure sum, said Wood. He would not reveal the group’s identity other than to say they were not sport-related.

Now this astounds me. Getting a .com.au domain name is supposed to be rather strictly enforced. That is, you are not supposed to be able to get one unless you have a registered company with the name you want as the domain. And as I understood it, you couldn’t just get a similar permutation, it had to basically be your company name, and that’s it. So, which domain registrar sold tennis.com.au to someone who isn’t involved in sport? What grounds did they get it on?

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

This one gets a gig because it’s funny. I wonder if they noticed? This one gets a gig because everyone knows it’s true. Except in my case, of course. This one gets a gig because the poster didn’t pay enough postage. This one gets a gig because I’m an apostrophe nazi. Does he mean his friend has multiple wives, as it is written. Or does he really mean friends’ wives. I mean, he could be in Utah. This one gets a gig because we used to do the same thing, years and years ago. Our phone number was one digit different to a Hospital, and we used to have people ringing up at all hours looking for it, so we started answering with “Hello, Northern Community Hospital.” But we never managed to answer like that when it was a phone call for the hospital.

Since I share my iTunes music, or more specifically, the music files themselves between a variety of clients, I’m not really interested in having iTunes find the artwork for me. This is mainly because the data is stored in the iTunes folder, not the MP3/AAC files themselves. So, I’d rather go through and find the artwork and add it manually. Often, this will be scanning the original CD cover, if it’s in good enough condition. With the inclusion of the artwork view in the iTunes main window, this task is much, much easier. Before, I had to use some crazy AppleScripting to find the tracks missing artwork; now I just have to scroll down until I find the tracks that are missing it. And then hunt around for the CD, or google for it.

I had a bit of an issue with my NSLU2 tonight. I wasn’t able to install coreutils. It was complaining that busybox-links was installed, and it was clashing. However, I didn’t have it installed, and no amount of ipkg remove busybox-links, or ipkg -force-overwrite install coreutils was working. Then I came across Slugging, which shows how to deal with this exact problem: remove the busybox _and _busybox-links stanzas from the file /usr/lib/ipkg/status. Thanks, z0mbi3. Even though I hate l33tsp33k.