Cut — Big geeky thing about Python. Don't bother commenting if it's not relevant
Righty, I've been hacking on the Debian katie suite recently. It's written in Python for the most part and so I had to learn python. I have to say that Python is everything I expected it to be, and more besides. Python is syntactically clean, very expressive, easy to pick up, probably quite a good scripting language for people who don't already know perl, and probably even a good one for people who do. However the prediction that it hurts to code in python has been borne out. I actually end up physically in pain when I code in python (well, more accurately when I read python). I was completely right that cut&paste is infinitely harder in python than in a language where your editor can re-flow for you, and I very much rely on coding in isolation and then slapping code into place. My tab and backspace keys got a big workout and I learnt to use the edge of an xterm to line up code.

So this new W32/Mydoom.A@mm virus.. Why haven’t people learnt from W32/Swen.[AB]@mm yet?

Cut — Email processing graph from Pepperfish
On this graph you can see what happens when people get into the office in the UK, have their first coffee and then start to open their mails for the day. The blue line is “legitimate” mail, the red line is “spam” and the grey line is “viruses”—the green line shows a cumulative average across the day overall.—At 21:00 this announcement was made. We went from only scanning those domains which had pay-for service to scanning them all.

Cut — Differences are what make us all interesting... Things said today on a talker...
Differences are what make us all interesting... Things said today on a talker...

 CCCCC       :XXXXX> If you knew me better you'd realise those would be covered in       rubber, too! CCCCC drifts off into a pervy reverie. MMMMM is relieved to       know XXXXX doesn't *know* CCCCC that well 

So, there were a few things which interested me today in the news… Here’s a redux:

• UK Student tells Blair debt is unacceptable
• A few questions are suggested that might be asked by a cloned child
• The UK’s worst schools are not necessarily filled with the least teachable children
The government’s plans for ‘top-up fees’ contains no contingency for failure
• A stark example of how university fees will result in unbalanced debt
• The Spirit rover ponders a stone

What news items caught your eye today?

At midday today, I plodded off into Cambridge to visit Maplin, there-to-buy some bits of electronic componentry. Then, in conjunction with a bit of solder, some swearing, and a couple of op-amps kindly provided by a friend; I began the arduous process of constructing Mrs Eudora’s wally jumblats strike again (or in slightly more mundane terms—a -3dB phase inverting stereo to mono downmixing stage with integral balanced power supply) to connect my pre-amplifier to my Mordaunt-Short subwoofer acquired earlier in the week. At Nine PM this evening, the jumblats were complete, in place, and providing me with lots of bassy goodness. Yum. (By the way, both Mrs Eudora, and her wally jumblats are defined here.)

Well, today was a bit odd. I had a followup appointment at the DAC because my face was still swollen, and was prescribed some antibiotics (a short sharp 3-day series) which should just give my body the help it needs in order to not have to swell my neck glands to the size of footballs to fight what’s left of the infection. Also, someone called “Wedge” who lives somewhere I’m not saying bought me a copy of Neuromancer from my Amazon wishlist. This concerns me slightly because there’s no message with it, no hint of why they have bought me the book, and their full postal address on the invoice. If anyone knows who this person/organisation might be, either comment here, or send me an email, catch me on IRC/MH etc etc etc. If for no other reason, it’d be nice to know who bought me this so that I can thank them.

So today has been interesting. Livejournal:nunfetishist discovered someone in the village getting rid of Mordaunt-Short subwoofer for £20—so we had that. Also this morning I had my LL6 out. (that’s the one-from back tooth on the left hand side (as I see it) of my lower-jaw)—it had become infected underneath a nearly 10 year old filling, and the choice was extract now & bridge later, or do a temporary cleanup now, then have a full two-session root-canal treatment to save the tooth. I chose the less traumatic extraction. I rang the dental access centre at 08:30 and at 09:50 I was in the dentist’s chair. By 10:30 I was back in the car, fighting to keep my lack of breakfast in my stomach, and driving home to sleep. As a result, I’ve done sweet-nothing on my ftp-master work and next to nothing on my irda-watch tool. I’ll look into doing some more on that another night. For now, I wish I had ice-cream.

Thanks to some source dug out by Ross Burton I managed to get most of the way to my irda monitor last night. As an aside, until Daniel Stone gets his updated dbus 0.20 packages up, I have put my hacked-together cruddy ones here.

I spent much of last night learning about D-Bus in an attempt to prepare myself for writing my IrDA monitoring tools. Both myself and Livejournal:keybuk believe that D-Bus is the right thing to try and use for this, all I have to do is work out how. Unfortunately this is made less than easy by a total lack of any good tutorial or examples. Even given the dbus-monitor and dbus-send tools I have been unable to actually demonstrably send a D-Bus message from one app to another. If anyone has any clues/ideas, I’d be grateful. Otherwise it’s going to be a case of blindly coding in a desperate attempt to get somewhere.

Well, after finishing helping Our Illustrious Leader (Livejournal:milchi) to go shopping, (quite how one man can spend so long choosing moisturiser is beyond me) I set-to sorting out a pile of Debian stuff I had left over. I completed a lua50 set of patches, including fixes to the lua-config50 script and manpage. Once that was done and uploaded I looked at the colloquy outstanding bugs. In a fit of ‘I know, this will be interesting for him’ I suggested to Livejournal:nunfetishist that it might be good if he took over the maintainership of the Debian package for colloquy since he is, after all, the upstream for it. Livejournal:nunfetishist took one look at it and declared that I should remove colloquy from Debian because it’s clearly not worth keeping the package there. I have accordingly filed a RFA (request for adoption) to see if anyone else wants to take on the package. If noone responds, I’ll retitle that as a request-for-removal and get rid of it from the archive. It’s a sad day when upstream says the Debian package is not worth it because the Debian maintainer has clearly spent more effort on making the package nice than the average user would spend downloading and building it. I see that as a pretty blinkered view considering how much nicer to use the Debian package is in my opinion. But then again, Livejournal:nunfetishist plainly doesn’t appreciate things like init scripts or having things compiled for you.

Now that planet Debian is properly up and going, I figured I ought to warn any regular non-geek readers that I’ll be doing my best to make more geeky postings to this journal. Also, for the planet Debian readers, I shall try to keep my slightly more surreal postings marked so that pD doesn’t pick them up.

Okay then, so I have spent an evening looking at dildos on the internet. As yet I can’t choose one, although Livejournal:nunfetishist assures me that if I get one it’ll increase the amount of fun I can have during sex. Then the conversation wandered off into whether girls snog more wetly than men or not. I need a new topic :-)