Matt Croydon::Postneo

Author: Matt Croydon

  • Netflix

    We caught the Netflix bug today.

    We went from zero to 17 in the queue in just under 10 minutes.

    Rawk!

  • OpenMosix 2.4.22-1 Released

    Newsforge notes that OpenMosix 2.4.22-1, which coincides with the 2.4.22 kernel, has been released.

    I’ve plugged it before, but OpenMosix is by far the easiest way to experiment with clustering without having to dedicate a set of hardware to it.  It’s really simple to install and ‘just works’ in migrating forked processes to other machines in the cluster.

    It is simple.  It is beautiful.  It is OpenMosix.

  • The Squirrel Programming Language

    Suddenly I want to master the programming language Squirrel.  If I were to design a programming language, it would be called monkey and would be LOAF-enabled.  Yeah.

  • age++

    Yep, I get to increment my age today!

    You should have Weird Al’s version of Happy Birthday stuck in your head too.

  • [ Spooks ]

    Spooks Series 1 showed up today.  Minirant to follow.

  • The World Has Fewer Choices Today

    Reuters via Yahoo News (link rot warning):

    U.S. television network NBC won Vivendi Universal’s marathon show-business auction on Tuesday with a proposed merger to create a new entertainment industry giant valued at more than $40 billion.

    This sets the scene for Godzilla XXI: MSNBCVivendiUniversal vs. Clear Channel.

    This scares the crap out of me, what about you?

  • My PythonToolbox

    I have posted PythonToolbox, a list of modules and resources that I use quite often with Python.  It includes modules that I commonly use for database access, markup, XML input/output, templating, searching, and classification.  It also has a section on resources that I always seem to be turning to.  Russ also helped out by adding some additional resources.

    As always, it’s a wiki page, so if there’s something that you think should be in my PythonToolbox, feel free to add it.  Enjoy!

  • A Collection of Links

    Yet another weekend offline.  Here are many links that are currently cluttering the taskbar:

    I had more yesterday, but I lost a post somewhere in the process.

  • Outage

    Ack.  I didn’t know my machine’s IP for a few days.  Blogging should resume tonight or tomorrow.

  • Problems with Gadfly (Python 2.3/Win32)

    Hmm, I seem to be banging my head against the wall here.  I’ve been looking at Gadfly, a python database that supports a subset of SQL.  I haven’t tested it against other versions of Python on other platforms, but I’m having some issues with it under Python 2.3 on Win32.  Here’s a code snippet copied and pasted from the Gadfly documentation:

    
import gadfly
connection = gadfly.gadfly()
connection.startup("mydatabase", "./")
cursor = connection.cursor()
cursor.execute("create table ph (nm varchar, ph varchar)")
cursor.execute("insert into ph(nm, ph) values ('arw', '3367')")
cursor.execute("select * from ph")
for x in cursor.fetchall():
  print x
# prints ('arw', '3367')
connection.commit()

    The only problem is, here’s what I get as output:

     ('3367', 'arw')

    A simple reversing wouldn’t be too hard to deal with, but in a more complex situation, I had an ID field first that was ending up somewhere in the middle during output.  It definately wasn’t the order that I was expecting.

    Any thoughts?  At first I thought that I was doing something horribly stupid, but I’m supposed to get one answer and I’m getting another! 🙂

  • Geolocation in Radio Userland and Movable Type

    Mikel Maron has released a tool for embedding geolocation data in an RSS feed.

    For the record, there is already an RSS module that does the same thing: the ICBM RSS Module.  It can be applied to entire feeds and/or single entries.

    Update: Thanks to Jim [old blog new blog] for pointing out MTLocation, which allows you to geolocate your Movable Type blog.

    Another Update: I got an email from Mikel.  He’s going to look into using the ICBM module.  Cool!

  • RSS Geek

    You know you’re a geek when a friend asks you to drop him a line, and you get it via RSS.

  • Low Power, Low Connectivity

    Ack! Thunder storms suck!

  • Richmond Gets Apple

    MacCentral:

    An Apple retail store will open at Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va., on Thursday, Sept. 4. The grand opening will be from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

  • September 25th is Free Wi-Fi Day in the US

    Wi-Fi Networking News relays the news that on September 25th, Intel is footing the bill for Wi-Fi pretty much across the United States:

    The list of participants includes AT&T plain and AT&T Wireless, Boingo Wireless, Cometa, iPass, Sprint, STSN (iBahn), Toshiba, Verizon Wireless, and Wayport.

    So that’s pretty much every Starbucks, hotel lobby, resturant, and airport in the US that has Wi-Fi connectivity.

  • Why I’m Happy With T-Mobile (All Over the World)

    Some background: I signed up with T-Mobile a couple of months ago after many unhappy years with Sprint PCS.  I snagged a Nokia 3650 for free after rebates through Amazon.  I pay about $40/mo for service (600 anytime, unlimited nights and weekends) and about $10 for GPRS service, an additional $3 for 500 text messages, plus various taxes.

    I called T-Mobile’s customer service the other day to enable international roaming ($.99/min in the UK), and while I had the very helpful service rep on the phone, I asked if I could switch my $9.99/mo 10MB GPRS plan to the current $9.99/mo unlimited plan.  It took her a few minutes of computer wrangling, but she switched it over without a problem.

    I also asked her how much GPRS roaming in the UK would be.  She put me on hold for a minute or two, and came back with the wonderful information that GPRS roaming costs $0.99/MB in the UK.

    That’s actually cheaper than some GPRS plans for people that live in the UK.

    The difference that a world phone makes is amazing.  It can go almost anywhere.  T-Mobile’s GPRS coverage is spotty in the midwest and away from major urban/suburban areas, but it works everywhere that I’ve been around the US and all over Europe.  Try that with your CDMA phone.

  • LOAF.py

    I released version 0.3.1p1 of my LOAF project this evening.

    LOAF.py is released under a BSD license.  More information can be found at the project page.

  • Notable Software Releases: Subversion and Sharpdevelop

    Here are a few quick links to some new software out this weekend:

  • Craig’s List Via RSS!

    I was looking at one of my favorite sections of Craig’s List DC: the Computer and Tech forsale section.

    I was thinking that it would be excellent to have this information in my RSS aggregator, so I viewed the source of the page, curious how hard it would be to scrape.  In doing so, I found this gem:

    <link rel=alternate type=application/rss+xml href=index.rss title="Craigslist - computers & tech in washington, DC">

    I added index.rss to the end of the usual URL, and lo and behold, there is a valid RSS feed.  It’s RSS 1.0 for those of you keeping score.

    Does anyone know how long this has been out there?  Needless to say, I’m subscribed.

    It also looks like their local job listings have an RSS feed.  Rock on!  Also, because they use the <link/> tag in their HTML, it’s RSS autodiscoverable!

  • Widescreen NetNewsWire

    Jonathan Rentzsh has tweaked his copy of NetNewsWire to better fit his widescreen Mac.  He has also published the steps that you can take to do the same.