One Laptop Per Child
By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.
By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.
Although I haven’t been lucky enough lately to get to do any Python programming at work or in my spare time, I still end up tweaking the occasional file or fixing a bug here and there—And hope springs eternal for what the future may hold. A friend pointed out that he wanted to find a better Python editor, and brought Stani’s Python Editor (or SPE) to my attention, which wasn’t even on my radar a year ago but seems very promising now that I’ve had a chance to look.
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One of my original requests to Andrew was to extend Boodler’s scheduling time limitation (of just over one hour), which seemed too restrictive for those of us who “think big” and wanted something to happen further in the future than that limitation would allow — a perfectly reasonable request, especially when you listen for extended periods of time, and/or want to introduce a high level of randomness in your environments (including events’ overall duration).
… But not because I’m spring cleaning. It’s been over a month since I’ve so much as touched the keyboard here—not that anyone’s noticed except me, feeling guiltier for every passing day. That isn’t to say that nothing’s happened; whether it’s worth sharing (or reading) is a different question altogether. I wonder lately whether I should bother to keep a blog at all.
I decided to spend my Friday working on a small side-project for work; as mentioned in a few earlier posts, I wanted to learn a bit of CherryPy and Cheetah, so it looks like this is my chance.
Since jEdit is my favourite text editor, and I couldn’t find an existing mode definition out there for Cheetah’s template (*.tmpl) format, I made one myself. Not exactly rocket science, but it might save someone a few minutes.
I’ve been laying low these past few weeks with good reason: more layoffs at work, and greater pressure from head office to deliver the finished product (including a drop-dead date I’m pretty sure we’ll miss). I’ve still got plenty to do, but all the critical-path items are up to the developers.
This is the worst lull in updates I’ve had since I started my blog. On the other hand, it took about seven years from when I bought the domain to my first post, so things aren’t that bad once you put them into perspective.
I’ve been working pretty hard, lately: Work is gearing up for a product release in early January so there’s a lot to do—especially since situations like these tend to bring a whole bunch of “Oops, we forgot to do x, can you handle it?”’s to the surface. In particular, I’ve been playing with Apache FOP for the past couple weeks to enable us to generate dynamic-content PDF files on the server based on SVG source material (and possibly XHTML as well, now, too). Very interesting technology if you have to work with PDF documents.
It’s finally the weekend and none too soon: My week hasn’t been especially bad (but not especially good either. Kind of so-so) but today could have gone better—Squeaker wanted to be entertained at 4 in the morning, I had a fun visit at the bank with my financial advisor (I think I’ve decided I prefer going to the dentist), and I’m dog-tired well before my usual bedtime.
I’ve been slaving away this week at lots of Python code, too—it’s the worst kind, to boot; I’m refactoring my own old code, which is a thankless job if ever there were one (although I am adding a number of extra little switches and things for efficiency, better error handling, output verification, etc.). When you’re already pressed for time on a product release schedule, trying to explain to your manager that you’re trying to leave maintainable code that could mean literally hours of saved time per week from those that employ it regularly is pretty awkward when he knows the old version worked (no matter how old and busted you think it is).