Finally, George R. R. Martin has announced a release date for A Dance With Dragons! Tuesday, July 12, 2011. Yay! What is even more impressive is that Amazon knows how many pages it will be even though the author has not finished the book yet.
Now I have to rack my brain back four or five years and try and remember what happened in the last book of his A Song of Ice and Fire series….
Today’s Ctrl+Alt+Del comic has brought it all flooding back to me… I can accept that perhaps “after midnight” ends at sunrise the next day, but it never seemed biologically plausible that such an occurrence was so oddly specific to a given time. Do the Mogwai’s bodies have some internal clock that will detect midnight with great accuracy? Can it correct for daylight savings time? What if I feed the Mogwai in one timezone after 11pm and then take it across to the adjacent timezone where that feeding now occurred past midnight?
I have been noticing that sometimes Google fails at selecting an appropriate image for its news articles.
I know carrying and giving birth to twins is difficult, but even then…
That is not Miss Australia… (and yes I checked out the NSFW pictures and the were not all they were advertised to be).
The stress of the situation appears to have taken its toll on that teenage boy.
I’m fairly sure that “man in the middle” is Australia’s first female Prime Minister.
After some interesting attempts at importing my old posts and comments, followed by some manual post recovery and editing of the MySQL database, it appears my site is completely restored and running on my new host. All files should hopefully have migrated too… but let me know if you spot anything missing.
While I was restoring everything, I took the time to update my theme and make my modifications the proper way using a child theme. I’m still not 100% satisfied with the adjustments; the menu at the top could be reduced in height by a few pixels and the line under the header should always span the page. I am entirely stuck on how to achieve those, so I would be very appreciative if any CSS experts out there want to post fixes for those.
Now, on to posting the insightful blog posts I am so well known for!
After struggling with my current provider and their unstable MySQL server for the past couple of months, the final straw was broken when the the posts table from my WordPress database became gone. So it is goodbye to 000webhost and your free hosting (hence not too much complaining from me…).
Given my total website requirements are modest – WordPress (PHP-4.3 and MySQL-4.1.2) and some file hosting – there is little point in me getting a VPS (and having to figure out how to set all that up!). So I am giving Laughing Squid a go. I figure you can not go too far wrong at $6 a month.
So now I just have to restore everything… These things always happen when you have critical deadlines for work, so this will take a few weeks. I have backups to restore from (although a couple of my recent blog posts are missing and require rescuing from the Google cache), so everything will be back eventually.
Edit: comments have been temporarily disabled to make my restore easier.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me messages enquiring how I am doing with all the flooding in Brisbane. I even got messages from people I do not think I have ever had any direct interaction with… As long as your stalking sticks to that level, I will remain only slightly concerned!
Fortunately, I live in the northern suburbs of Brisbane so I have not been directly affected by the flooding. The worst I have had to deal with was work being closed for a couple of days, the internet going down for two hours and the supermarket shelves being a bit bare…
In typical Brisbane fashion, even the statue of King Wally (a local living sporting legend) was prepared for the flooding. And the man himself proved he was worth it; stopping to help complete strangers bail water out of a house today. I think one of the heroes of the day is the person who paddled a canoe down the main streets of the city centre handing out cold beers to the people doing sandbagging. That is the sort of city Brisbane is.
I was reading a thread on the python-dev mailing list where someone asked about ideas for porting modules to python-3.x. That lead me to wonder what the current status of python-3 support was in various well used modules. So here is a summary of my research. As a disclaimer, I have not directly asked any of the involved module developers what their opinion is, but have rather summarised what I can find posted on various mailing lists. Also, the modules I list are my own subjective selection of what I think are popular modules, so do not take inclusion/exclusion in this list to mean anything.
GUI Toolkits:
PyQt – Has supported python-3 since v4.5 (release 2009-06-05).
PyGTK – Is effectively going to be a dead project with the upcoming release of GTK+3 so will not be ported to python-3. Instead, projects should move to PyGObject, which has some limited python-3 support with v2.26.0 (base and Introspection modules only – released 2010-09-27)
wxPython – python-3 support has not been started and according to their roadmap will likely be on hold until a major rewrite is finished.
Science:
numpy – Supports python-2 and python-3 from a single code base since v1.5.0 (released 2010-08-31), although the module needed for its testing framework (python-nose) is not yet officially ported.
scipy – Will support python-3 with the release of v0.9.0. As far as I can tell, python-3 support is finished in their SVN.
matplotlib – I could not find any details on the current status of python-3 support for matplotlib, so I assume this has yet to start. The porting of numpy to python-3 should give this a huge boost.
Database:
pysqlite – the sqlite module has been part of the Python stdlib for a while now, so has supported python-3 from the beginning. I guess the external development version has similar support.
psycopg2 – This is actually quite a weird situation… It appears to have been ported at the end of 2008 and looking at the patch should have been able to simulataneously support python-2 and python-3. However, when it got applied to the master git branch in mid 2009, a python2 branch was immediately created and all development for the last 18 months has occurred on that branch.
mysql-python – An old blog post indicates there is a rewrite happening and python-3.x support will be added once this starts shaping up to beta level.
Misc:
distribute – Supported python-3 since v0.6.2 (released 2009-09-26).
Django – The FAQ indicates they believe porting to python-3 will require dropping support for older python-2.x versions. According to mailing lists posts I could find, they intend to support the main python version that is used by a currently supported RHEL, so it could take quite some time before they do this. However, an initial porting effort showed that quite some progress could be made without having to drop support for current python-2.x versions.
PIL – The release notes for 1.1.7 states that “A version of 1.1.7 for 3.X will be released later”, but that was posted on 2009-11-15 and there is a lack of further updates on its status.
pygame – Some python-3 support was available in 1.9.0 (released 2009-07-31) and the number of modules that work with python-3 looks set to markedly increase with 1.9.2 (due to numpy now being python-3 compatible). Its successor (pgreloaded) similarly supports python-3.
Twisted – There is a python-3.x milestone in their bug tracker, but there appears to be no dedicated porting effort. Having a quick look at its dependencies, there may need to be some downstream work before it is started anyway. Also, their buildbot that uses the “-3″ warnings flag shows there is a lot of groundwork to be done.
So depending on exactly what you want to do, python-3.x might be an option. Graphical application programming, scientific programming and gaming all have reasonable support currently and that only looks set to get better in the near future. However, if you want to do anything web based or interact with a database other than MySQL, it looks like python-3 support could be quite some time away.
I had a successful grading for Hapkido today, where I was awarded a blue belt with two red tabs (exactly half-way between white and black belts – at least in terms of belt numbers…).
It had been a long time between gradings. My last one was in 2002, back when I was a member of the Dunedin (New Zealand) club. Having moved across the world a couple of times really makes it difficult to stay with the one federation, so it has been good to reconnect with it in Brisbane.
I recently went on a driving/camping trip into Carnarvon Gorge, which is about a 720 km (450 miles) drive to the north-west of Brisbane. (Well, I actually did this a little over a month ago now but I never got around to organising photos until now…)
The drive to Carnarvon Gorge was a long one… I was sole driver due to a lack of drivers license being held by the other person coming on the trip. It also rained fairly heavily most of the way and the roads were in a bit of disrepair. Luckily the traffic was low so you could just drive on the other side of the road to avoid the larger potholes. The heavy rain did make it less likely that a kangaroo would jump in front of me, so that was a bonus I suppose. However, it made the actual road into the Gorge into mud (it is gravel and had just been graded) with multiple flooded sections. Fortunately, none of the flooding was too deep to ford, so we slid our way to the camping ground.
My main motivation for driving that far was to see an Emu (pictured) because I have never seen any of the Ratites (large flightless birds) in the wild before. The region also provided a good chance of seeing both Australian Mudnesters (White-winged Chough and Apostlebird) and the Australian Bustard, all of which I had not seen before. Seeing all these was completed by the time we put up our tents on the first night, so that was a real bonus after the hard drive.
During the first night, the wind really picked up. Trees fell down in the camping area and blocked the road out for the start of the morning… Not that I was affected by that, because the creek at the entrance to the camping grounds has also substantially risen and I could not cross it with the car for a few hours anyway. We were actually quite lucky to take no damage to car or tents (and the people inside) looking at the size of a branch that fell only 20 metres away from where we camped.
When we finally escaped the camping ground, it was on to the main point of the trip; the main Gorge walking track with all its side-tracks to various attractions. The main track follows the river winding between spectacular sandstone cliffs. But as we were to find out, that track involves many river crossings. These are normally nice step-across-the-boulder affairs, but the rain meant that the river had risen quite substantially and the track was officially closed for the day. Luckily, that was more to keep groups of elderly from crossing the river and the ranger indicated he would let us cross some time in the early afternoon. A couple of short walks of little note and a decent lunch and we were on our way.
The flooding did make the river crossings far more time consuming than expected (some were mid-thigh level…) and did I mention that there were many of them, so we had to skip most of the side-attractions on the walk to the Big Bend camping area for that night in order to get there before dark. The only attraction we made it to on the first day was the Amphitheatre. The Amphitheatre is a gouged out hold in the sandstone that is about 60m tall on all sides. The entrance is a crack in one of the walls. And it lives up to its name, reflecting all sounds made such that you could whisper to a person on the other side and they would hear you clearly.
We had intended to camp for two nights at the Big Bend camping area, and leave in somewhat of a hurry on the final day, but we decided to skip the planned walk to a lookout at the top of the sandstone cliffs and instead take a slower walk out and stop at all the side attractions we missed on the first day. This actually turned out to be a good plan as we were unable to locate the entrance to the walk to the top of the cliffs anyway. Well, it turns out that maybe we did locate it, but we dismissed it as a crack in the side of the cliff because of the amount of debris that had been washed into it.
There are two main areas of Aboriginal art works to see on the side tracks; Cathedral Cave and The Art Gallery. Apparently the Art Gallery is one of the best examples of stencil art in Australia and it did live up to its billing with outlines of boomerangs, shields, axes and some weird double handed arms.
The final attraction on the way out was the Moss Garden. We attempted to get to this on the first day but the river was too flooded then. Luckily it had lowered enough for us to get into on the return walk. The Moss Garden is a cut path in the sandstone that receive little sunlight so has sheets of moss over all its walls. This is quite a difference from the rather dry landscape all around it and was very peaceful with the crystal clear creak in a small waterfall in the middle.
And from there, it was a straight walk back out to the car. In total we made forty-two river crossings over the two days of walking (did I mentioned there were many river crossings already?). We stayed overnight in our original camping spot and managed a to drive home at a nice relaxed pace the next day in quite reasonable weather, only breaking heavily to avoid one kangaroo.
Sometimes people have really good ideas of features that should be included in software that end up having unintended side effects. This is one of those stories.
Enter Liferea, probably the best RSS feed reader written in GTK2. You can tell it is good because they provide links to alternative feed readers on their front page… that shows confidence!
But it has one “feature” that has had me tearing my hair out. Whenever it checks a feed and encounters a redirect, it blindly updates the feeds URL. While that seems a good idea (as it prevents constant redirects), it causes some issues… Imagine opening your feed reader in a hotel with a paywall or terms of service page where you have to agree to go any further and all your feeds get their URL changed.
When that happened to me, I grabbed the source code and deleted the entire URL update segment. Given the Arch policies on patching and upstream issues, this is the sort of “fix” that would not make it into our repos so I have had to maintain my own Liferea package for a few months now. But that is all to change with a patch being accepted upstream. Of course, the patch does things the correct way and updates URLs that redirect only with HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) codes.
So now I just have to trust that hotels do not issue a 301 codes to their paywall. For some reason, I am still worried…