All | 43 Folders | Accessibility | BoingBoing | Books | Computer Related | Family | Films | General | Hacking | Hobbies | Humor | Java | Links | Omni | OpenSolaris | Puzzles and Games

« Previous page | Main | Next page »
20090422 Wednesday April 22, 2009

Links for 22nd Apr 2008

A summary of my recent interesting twittering.

[]

( Apr 22 2009, 07:41:50 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090414 Tuesday April 14, 2009

Closed TRACKEDINBUGSTER - Two Months Later

See a previous post for more background.

Well it's almost two months on, and I've shuffled a load more bugs over to Bugster, so I thought I'd run my script again.

There are now 644 bugs that have been closed in OpenSolaris Bugzilla as TRACKEDINBUGSTER. Here's their current status, this time with percentage figures: 

1-Dispatched:           146       22.67%
2-Incomplete:           24         3.72%
3-Accepted:             70        10.87%
4-Defer:                16         2.48%
5-Cause Known:          6          0.93%
6-Fix Understood:       6          0.93%
7-Fix in Progress:      15         2.33%
8-Fix Available:        11         1.71%
10-Fix Delivered:       179       27.80%
11-Closed:              171       26.55%

[]

[]

[]

( Apr 14 2009, 08:58:51 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]

20090407 Tuesday April 07, 2009

Links for 7th April 2009

Summarized for posterity.

[]

( Apr 07 2009, 10:40:16 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090403 Friday April 03, 2009

Automatically Change Your Twitter Background

As a follow-on to yesterday's post, the Python cback.py script has been updated to automatically send your newly generated random image to Twitter to become your new background image. That functionality is not part of the "standard" Twitter Python API so many thanks to lucy for providing the magic necessary code

The new version of the script is here. Save it, then rename it to cback.py. You will also need multipart.py. Before you use it, you will need to adjust the username and password lines (about line 55) to be your valid user name and password.

Twitter is sometimes flaky in taking these images ("urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error"), but then again, I sometimes get similar problems when I try to change my background image from the Twitter Settings dialog.

The cback.py script sometimes generates images greater than the allowed size when used with the wallpaper option. I'll need to fix that.

[]

[]

( Apr 03 2009, 09:42:14 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090402 Thursday April 02, 2009

Generate Random Backgrounds For Twitter Revisited

You may remember my previous attempt to do this. There was the problem of it generating a .bmp file, which then had to be converted to .jpg or .gif (with something like Gimp), before it could be uploaded to Twitter.

I've gone back and reworked my cback script so that it now uses the Python Imaging Library. Not only does this fix the .jpg problem, it has made it an order of magnitude faster. The new source code is here. The changes were minimal.

The final problem to try to solve, (in trying to totally automate this), is to see if there is a way to automatically upload the new image to Twitter. I'll leave that for another day.

[]

[]

( Apr 02 2009, 09:36:11 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090330 Monday March 30, 2009

Links for 30th March 2009

[]

( Mar 30 2009, 02:37:17 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090326 Thursday March 26, 2009

Generate Random Backgrounds For Twitter

I had a hack attack yesterday. I converted an old C program of mine that automatically generated random patterned backgrounds for an X11 desktop, to now generate similar random patterns, but this time save them in a .bmp file. If you then convert then to .jpg (or .gif or .png) they can be uploaded and used as your new Twitter background.

The simple Python script that did this is here. A big thankyou to Paul McGuire for writing the bmp.py code that makes this so easy. You can find that file here.

You can see a sample random circle background pattern on my Twitter page.

It's version 0.1 of the code. A quick simple conversion. It needs to be tidied up and improved. It should also just generate .jpg (or .gif or .png) files. I need to see if there is a standard Python class trhat does something like that.

What would be even nicer was if it could automatically change your Twitter background, but I don't see anything in the Python API for Twitter that allows anything like that. Pity.

[]

[]

( Mar 26 2009, 09:33:01 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090322 Sunday March 22, 2009

Links for 22nd March 2009

More interesting Twitter links from the last week.

[]

( Mar 22 2009, 07:31:36 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090315 Sunday March 15, 2009

Links for 15th March 2009

These are the interesting links I've posted to Twitter since I started, just over a couple weeks ago. I wonder if there is a way to get them automatically reposted (and/or summarized to this blog).

[]

( Mar 15 2009, 04:43:27 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090309 Monday March 09, 2009

Be Funky

After a tweet from ThinGuy (thanks!), I just had to try out BeFunky.com. One of each type of art style of my mug above, and I've also added them to the collection of thumnail images that get randomly selected to be at the top left of my blog.

Wonderfully simplistic BUI. I wish all site designers could make it this easy to use their site.

I don't think I've got the patience to create another A Scanner Darkly (which we finally watched over the weekend and were very disappointed), but it sure makes it easy to create simple artwork.

Hmm. Maybe another cartoon...

[]

[]

( Mar 09 2009, 09:56:29 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20090302 Monday March 02, 2009

Backing Up Your Twitter Posts

Now I'm twittering I wanted to make sure I had a way to locally save my pearls of wisdom drivel. From googling, I'd found tweetake and twistory but didn't like the idea of passing over my username and password to a site I didn't know.

I then stumbled on a Python frontend to the Twitter API. I downloaded the compressed tarball and unpacked, built and installed it with: 

  $ gzip -dc python-twitter-0.5.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
  $ cd python-twitter-0.5
  $ python setup.py build
  $ pfexec python setup.py install

Now "backing up" my tweets is as simple as running: 

  $ python backup.py > richb-tweets.txt

where backup.py is: 

    import twitter

    api = twitter.Api()
    statuses = api.GetUserTimeline("richburridge")
    for s in statuses:
        date_ts = " ".join(s.created_at.split()[:4])
        print "%s: %s\n" % (date_ts, s.text)

for output that looks like: 

Mon Mar 02 20:39:10: Oooh! Twitter has a Python front-end to it's API: http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/ I can see hours of tinkering ahead.

Mon Mar 02 19:10:46: Added twitter monitor thingy to left column on main blog. Didn't help that Twitter went oopsie while I was debugging this.

...

(Adjust the "richburridge" user name to your own, if you want to use this).

Still lots more to explore with python-twitter, but that's enough for today.

[]

[]

[]

( Mar 02 2009, 02:26:58 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

20090226 Thursday February 26, 2009

I'm Now Twittering

Or tweeting or whatever it's called. Over here. I swore I wouldn't do it, because I thought it would turn into a timesink, but as I don't blog so much any more, maybe this is just the answer.

I've setup the account and done the profile but haven't spent the time to work out who I want to follow yet. I'll work on that tomorrow.

The other thing I want to do it work out how to automatically get my tweets to appear in my blog. I think I'll have to ask somebody who's "been there, done that", on how they did it.

[]

[]

( Feb 26 2009, 07:59:07 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

20090221 Saturday February 21, 2009

Another Book Meme

Geoff mentioned on his blog about another book meme, this one originating from the BBC. Nobody has tagged me, but I thought I'd give it a go.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. It's a weird ecclectic list. 

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

For me, '+' will mean that I not only intend to read the book, I actually already have a copy of it. I'm also going to add another entry: '-' will mean that I HATED it.

  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
  2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
  4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
  6. The Bible
  7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
  8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
  9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
  10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
  12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
  13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X+
  14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
  15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
  16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
  18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X+
  19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+
  20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
  21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
  22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
  23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
  24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
  26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X
  27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
  29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
  30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
  31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
  33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
  34. Emma - Jane Austen
  35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
  36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
  37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
  38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
  39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
  40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
  41. Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
  42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+
  43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving *
  45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
  46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
  47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
  48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
  49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding X-
  50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
  52. Dune - Frank Herbert X+
  53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
  54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
  55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
  56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
  58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X+
  59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X+
  60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
  62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
  63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
  65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
  67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
  68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
  69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
  70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville X-
  71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
  72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
  74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X+
  75. Ulysses - James Joyce
  76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
  77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
  78. Germinal - Emile Zola
  79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray *
  80. Possession - AS Byatt *
  81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
  82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
  83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
  84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
  85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
  86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry *
  87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
  88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
  89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
  90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
  91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
  92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks X+
  94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X-
  96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
  97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
  98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

If I've counted correctly that's 35 that I've read and 15 (17 really as one is a three book series) that I own and want to read. I need to start working on that. So many books, so little time.

Some people may ask why read a book if you are hating it. Well one of them (Moby Dick) was a class assignment. Why they force that kind of book done the throats of kids who are barely into their teens, I don't know. For others, I take the Magnus Magnusson (Mastermind) approach: "I've started so I'll finish". The undying hope that the book can only get better. It rarely does.

[]

[]

( Feb 21 2009, 08:52:13 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

20090217 Tuesday February 17, 2009

Closed TRACKEDINBUGSTER

For the past couple of weeks, I've been triaging bugs in the kernel and software sub-categories in the OpenSolaris Bugzilla bugs database.

Bugs that are filed in these two sub-categories tend to be catchalls for all the bugs that don't have another existing product/cat/sub-cat. defined that they could go into. They are also typically dumping grounds for bugs that are not being actively looked at by Sun engineers.

OpenSolaris releases are currently based on Nevada builds. We just take the SVR4 packages that the Nevada distributions create, and convert them into IPS packages and put those in network repositories or deliver via updated ISO images of the Live CD.

If we want these bugs to be fixed properly, then those fixes need to be applied to the Nevada sources. In order to get the Sun engineers to do that, they need to be aware of the bugs. That's why they are being transferred over to the Bugster database and closed here.

It's far from a perfect system, but hey, you work with what you've got.

In doing this bug transferring, I noticed that a lot of the new bugs that I'd filed in Bugster, were being actively picked up and worked on. That got me curious on just how successful this reverse transfer has been.

I wrote a small Python script that did a query to get a list of all the bugs that have been closed as TRACKEDINBUGSTER, and then scrapped this to get a list of all the BugsterCR values from their Whiteboard fields. I then used an internal Bugster->Web web site, to read each of those bug reports and extract the Status field. I then summarized the results.

(I fully appreciate that this would be much easier if I used SQL to integrate these bugs databases, but I don't know how to do that, or even where to go to find out how to do that).

Currently there are 400 bugs that have been closed in OpenSolaris Bugzilla as TRACKEDINBUGSTER. Here's their status: 

1-Dispatched:           99
2-Incomplete:           19
3-Accepted:             59
4-Defer:                8
5-Cause Known:          4
6-Fix Understood:       3       
7-Fix in Progress:      10      
8-Fix Available:        6       
10-Fix Delivered:       109
11-Closed:              87

The real bug that needs to be fixed here is to get the Sun engineers to actively monitor (and respond to) all bugs that are filed at defect.opensolaris.org (and I understand that that is being worked on), but it's nice to know that this triaging is having some effect, rather than all those open bugs just lying stagnant.

[]

[]

[]

( Feb 17 2009, 03:16:09 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

20090216 Monday February 16, 2009

Financial Advice - Drink Heavily

I was using an old post of mine this morning, to remind myself of how I'd rated my book collection, and to rerun the script now 9 months have past and I've a slew of new unread books.

One of the comments there is from Tyler and while I was waiting for the book rating script to finish, I wandered over to his blog. There was a very interesting perspective from November last year, on the current economic crisis and a great quote from his father:

"If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left. With Fannie Mae, you'd have $2.50 left of the original $1000. With AIG, you'd have less than $15 left. But if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drunk all the beer, then turned in the cans for the recycling refund, you'd have $214 cash. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily. It reduces anxiety too. Even better to buy in a state without a deposit and then return them into a state with a deposit refund."

[]

[]

( Feb 16 2009, 11:28:47 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink