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I'll be giving a introductory-level presentation on Urwid at the Python Malaysia February Meetup in two weeks. I'm covering the basics with a short presentation and there should be plenty of time for questions or digging in deeper on any aspect.
I decided to look at what blog tools are available in Linux. I want to use them with my WordPress.com blog, of course, so that is how I tested them.
I have only checked out a couple of tools, but I find them mostly not working very well with WordPress.com. The only one that has worked at all is QTM, so far.
This is the recommended tool for Linux, according to the WordPress site. It won’t install in Oneiric. I expect I could make it work if I fiddled with some settings for apt-get, maybe. But the author is not working on it, so no real desire to try.
Broken. Intended for Gnome 2. One of the libraries is not compatible with Gnome 3: “python-gnomeapplet”. Maybe there is no concept of applet in Gnome 3?
I tried it. Editing a new post worked. There were error messages connecting to WordPress.com. I was not able to post the blog because it could not get permission to write.
This one was able to post a message, but left the message in the “draft” state on WordPress.com. That may be my fault – there is a “draft/publish” drop down on the app.
Because it was “posted”, it put the file into some sort of archive state, so that the next time I went to edit, I had to fiddle around to be able to see it. Finished editing the post on WordPress.com.
There is at least one plugin for FireFox for editing blogs. But I was looking for tools for Gnome so I can try out Gnome 3, so I haven’t tried it yet.
In order to POST to the CREDIL news feed, you need to login to code.credil.org, and visit:
http://code.credil.org/projects/credil-pub/news
This is part of the "CREDIL" project.
If you want to advised (via ATOM/RSS) when there is news, just take the CREDIL news feed URL, which is:
http://code.credil.org/news
and tell your reader (such as Google Reader, Akgregator, Thunderbird, etc.) to subscribe to that URL.
It will dig through the HTML, looking for the a LINK meta tag that looks like:
link href="http://code.credil.org/news.atom?key=stuff" rel="alternate" title="ATOM" type="application/atom+xml"
and your system will pull this info regularly.
Biso will be presenting the next Lunch-and-Learn, in February, about Mobile Development. He has experience developing on various mobile platforms including Java Mobile, iPhone and Android.
CREDIL is hosting a series of lunch-and-learn talks. The talks are usually on the third Thursday of the month, from noon to one, on a variety of topics. Usually, one person talks on a topic that the others in the group are interested in.
All welcome! Please email us to let us know if you're coming. If a lot of people are coming, we'll reserve a larger room. Or, if you'd like to give a talk, we'll be interested to listen!
Today's talk is about "Belt-and-Suspenders", a way to keep in touch with your remotely deployed client machines. The presenter is Chris Meloche, the author of Belt and Suspenders.
Previous talks have been about i2c protocol and getting started with hardware hacking.
Today many have been raising awareness of USA's SOPA and PIPA. I thought I would back up a bit from those specific initiatives, and discuss just how far apart people are on this type of policy.
Sorry to anyone I talked to about working at Wind River.
We were hiring, now we are laying off.
We have all seen that before…
High tech. Gotta love it!
I am still working at Wind River, in the same position.
I installed Mint on my laptop the other day. Then I installed Cinnamon, which is Mint’s Gnome 3 based interface. I wanted to learn about Gnome 3′s powers, but without all the Gnome 3 hassle.
I have to get some DVD’s – they want to put a GB in the installer. Fortunately there is a CD version without Office software and without codecs. Somepages indicate there are Windows installers, but I didn’t find one. It would be nice to have one for my work computer.
Installing Cinnamon was easy. Select Cinnamon in Synaptic and install it. Err, no, not in the list of selected items when I tried to choose at login time. Select cinnamon-session and install that (the notes said to do that). And now I am in Cinnamon.
Actually, I liked “Nate”, Mint’s Gnome 2 interface, a bit better. I liked having the menu as one of the choices when you select the thingy in the top left corner. In Cinnamon, the menu is in the bottom left.
In the Cinnamon menu, there are three columns. The left column is favorites, with some stuff you can’t get rid of like shutdown and lock screen. When the mouse is over an item, the bottom of the menu block, on the right (as far away from the favorites as possible) is the name and one line description of that application.
It actually makes sense to be on the bottom right, you should soon know what your favorites are, and the right column is the apps of the highlighted category in the middle column.
Faves can be removed using the right click menu. Also, you can right-click on a program to add it to favorites.
By default, the Firefox menu system is missing. It turns out that Ubuntu disappeared it by installing a plugin that moved it to the Unity menu location, which is presumably some Mac-like common menu location.
So I could not use Firefox menus to get at the Addon Manager to kill the creepy addon.
I used a command line parameter to get at it, which I got from some web page I can’t find now. However, you can type “about:addons” in the address bar to get there.
The Guilty Addon is called “Global Menu Bar Integration”, and you can’t uninstall it, you can only disable it.
My laptop has Broadcom wifi, 4318 style. On all the other Ubuntu versions I have installed, I had to install the right thing, run the right script and then maybe remove the right lines from a config file.
This time, I was able to search in Synaptic for “Broadcom”, and install the package b43-fwcutter, and it worked! Wow!
Today I soldered wires onto a new plug for my computer speakers.
It Worked! – on the second try.
The first try was on a plug that was too small. What are 3/32″ plugs for anyway?
I celebrated Public Domain Day by sending a letter to my MP (David McGuinty in Ottawa South) and Senators for Ontario and Ottawa to highlight the public domain and the separate problems of Paracopyright.
Meera Nair wrote an article on how this may be a short lived celebration in that there is a desire as part of Trans-Pacific Partnership to extend the term of copyright from death+50 to death+70 years.
I often joke that copyright policy is as complex, understood, and as exciting, as tax policy. Most Canadians would prefer not to talk of either, and those of us who find either exciting are in a small minority Holidays I reflect on this oddity, given my favorite topics are some of the least interesting for most people I would visit.
I thought it would be interesting to start 2012 with a discussion of other ways in which there are similarities between tax and copyright policy, and look at how politicians and other people treat each.
One of Canada's best technology journalists, Jesse Brown, interviewed Techdirt.com editor Mike Masnick on the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act. While I agree with most of the discussion, I want to challenge some of the conclusions made at the end of the interview. It was discussed how "big copyright" had a history of lobbying, while tech firms were part of a start-up culture and until recently didn't play that game. This was behind why "big copyright" has been so successful at pushing forward laws which break some of the best features of modern technology, while at the same time not helping copyright holders.
This is based on the idea that there is only one tech sector involved, and that "big copyright" are in control of this game rather than being pawns of a more powerful player.
According to Google's archive of gnu.misc.discuss, 1992 was the year I became active in the Free Software movement. While the earliest posting I can find appears to be a naive copyright question about the public domain, other messages from the first few months of 1992 suggest I was already engaged in some of the discussions. With the new year approaching, I wanted to offer some thoughts on one of the conversations that has been constant the last 20 years. I then invite you to offer your own thoughts in CLUE's discuss@ mailing list.
The Humble Indie Bundle #4 was nice enough to bring Super Meat Boy and a bunch of other great games to Linux. The SMB people however seem to want to punish you for playing on a keyboard and leave you with SPACE as jump, SHIFT as run, and no way to reconfigure the keys.
Here is a little xmodmap script that makes playing on a keyboard much more enjoyable:
keysym x = space
keysym z = Shift_L
Just save this as xmodmap.meat and then run xmodmap -pke > xmodmap.orig to save your original key settings.
Finally, run xmodmap xmodmap.meat before starting the game, and xmodmap xmodmap.orig when you're done.
Python is a wonderful language, but some parts should really have bright WARNING signs all over them. There are features that just can't be used safely and others are that are useful but people tend to use in the wrong ways.
This is a rough transcript of the talk I gave at my local Python group on November 15, with some of the audience feed back mixed in. Most of this came from hanging around the Python IRC channel, something I highly recommend.
[update 2011-12-19: improved "array" critique, add "python -i" suggestion to "reload" critique, add html targets to sections]
[update 2011-12-20: include additional links from agentultra and ffrinch]
[update 2012-01-06: added hasattr and find]
As the Hansard reads, Parliament is now adjourned until Monday, January 30, 2012.
MPs are in their electoral districts, which is the best time for people to contact their MPs and let them know what they think about Bill C-11.
Most MPs, regardless of party affiliation, remain focused on how TPMs may circumvent fair dealings. While this is appropriate when discussing use control TPMs, access control TPMs in C-11 presumably regulate activities never before contemplated in Copyright law.
Conservatives believe this is something where consumer choice can solve any problems, not recognising that much of the harm from abuses of TPMs impact people other than the copyright holder and their audiences.
MPs remain largely unaware that there are 4 classes of owners impacted by Paracopyright, not only the familiar two which the Copyright portions of the bill impact.
When I noticed Mr. Saganash's tweet about his Huffington Post article, I replied to say that while I didn't agree with everything he wrote about Bill C-11, I was glad he noted the harm to creators and owners from TPMs. I suspect it would be worthwhile for me to unpack that comment.
In a reply to Mr. Saganash, Jason J Kee disagreed with the suggestion that most countries don't prohibit circumvention for non-infringing purposes. I believe this reply conflates two very different types of technological protection measures included in Bill C-11: use controls, and access controls.
On December 12, 2001 we had the seventh time when the House of Commons debated Bill C-11 (at Second Reading). I didn't write about the 6'th time as it was simply a vote on an amendment that was deferred from the 5'th day of debate.
The debate started with Mr. Paul Calandra (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, CPC, MP for Oak Ridges—Markham) giving a short promotion of the bill and then moving a motion "That this question be now put."
This year finally the kids are getting ebook readers for Christmas. So far I have been holding off from purchasing such devices because of the Digital Restrictions Management which is associated with them.
My opposition to them changed somewhat when I found that one of my favorite book publishers (O'Reilly) does not use any DRM and they actually trust their customers enough to take their word for it when they state that they already own the paper copy of a book so that they can then qualify for a $5 upgrade to the digital version. And these are not cheap books often between $50 and $100 per copy. This has bought a lot of good will from me, and when I am looking for technical books in the future (which I do frequently) I will certainly try to give preference to O'Reilly.
This release adds the long-requested linear scale feature to Speedometer. You can now also adjust the minimum and maximum values displayed, and switch all units shown to bits per second.
Last update:
Fri Jan 27 06:27:16 2012
Bart Trojanowski
Bob Trower
Brenda Butler
CLUE
CREDIL news feed
Dave O'Neill
Digital Copyright Canada
Ian Ward
Jean Richard
Michael P. Soulier
Michael Richardson
Ottawa Android
Pythian
Rick Leir
Rob Echlin