I’ve got a nice Compaq Presario R3000Z here at my desk, with pretty much everything I need. It’s only downfall is the Broadcom wireless driver inside. For whatever reason, Broadcom absolutely refuses to create a Linux driver. I’ve actually spoken with them via e-mail, and they basically said to pound sand, and talk to HP (the manufacturer of the notebook). Continue reading ‘Damn proprietary drivers…’
Archive for July, 2006
I’ve been an avid user of SuSE Linux for about 6 years now. They always seemed to be at the top of their game, turning out releases just about the time I was ready for a few new features. I’ve always been impressed with the strides they have made in improving the install process, and generally having a usable system out of the box. Since then, I’ve incoporated SuSE Linux Enterprise Server into my company’s IT infrastructure, and have loved every minute of it. So, when the release of SLED 10 was announced, I had to download it. Continue reading ‘SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10…’
A recent Subversion user had troubles with the middle of their svndiff stream becoming corrupt. Thanks to his openess, and sharing of the corrupted revisions, I was able to verify that it is the same issue as the one causing the read length line error. I was also able to update fsfsverify to attempt to fix this issue too. If you’re suffering from a similar problem, you might want to download the new version and give fsfsverify a try.
If you haven’t downloaded and tested the release candidate yet, please read this email, and download it now. A number of folks contributed greatly to the working copy performance, and the FSFS backend. I’ve been using it on a Linux box with a kernel tree working copy, and the improvement is very dramatic. There is a new svnsync tool, and a new –summarize option to svn diff that I think are particularly useful, along with the option to ignore white space changes in both diffs and in the blame output. Download the source and give it a try!
It amazes me how much Python keeps improving as a language. I’m continually impressed by the community, and their desire to implement an enhancement to the language in a well thought-out, and public manner. When the opportunity came to take the new Python 2.5 beta for a spin, I couldn’t resist. Continue reading ‘Testing Python 2.5!’
Slated for inclusion in Python 2.5, ctypes offers a foreign function interface (FFI) for bring shared libraries in, and wrapping them up so that you can access them through Python. It’s actually an amazing piece of work. It supports the shared libraries on every major platform, and makes it a snap to gain access to a few functions that you may need. I recently found that we’ll need the ctypes module for a project that I’m working on (I need it for PyVISA), so I also used it solve another problem: getting the amount of free disk space under a certain path.
Continue reading ‘Python’s FFI: ctypes’