I’m back from vacation, but am unfortunately one of the people who has suffered due to the current troubles at US Airways. My outbound flight from San Francisco to Orlando (I went on a cruise, not to the Disney greater metropolitan theme park) was operated by United, codeshared with US Air. Unfortunately for me, the… Read More »
I was hoping that Python 2.4 would make MoinMoin a little quicker, and a completely unscientific survey (surveys conducted after midnight are rarely scientific) confirms this. With Python 2.3, opening pages for editing and saving them almost always took at least five seconds per action. While it’s still sometimes slow, the actions will often take… Read More »
Note to Self for Future The following steps are for installing Python 2.4 on a shared server. After ssh’ing to the server: $ wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.4/Python-2.4.tgz $ cd Python-2.4 $ ./configure –prefix=$HOME/lib $ make && make install $ ln -s $HOME/lib/bin/python $HOME/bin/python/bin/python Credits: Thanks to Uche Ogbuji for publishing IRC transcript excerpts that reminded of the… Read More »
Nicholas decided to be the Thanksgiving surprise. However, he easily outweighed the twelve pound turkey we had purchased, so it was pretty easy to tell that a switch had been made. That and all the black fur poking through the holes in the box.
I just noticed that Python 2.4 was released at the end of November. Fedora Core 3 RPMs are already available from the Python.org site. It’s supposed to have better performance than 2.3, so I may have to try it on my website to see if it will speed up my MoinMoin wiki, which is frustratingly… Read More »
If you live in the Western United States, as of today you can get a free credit report from each of TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. You can do this once per year. Check out AnnualCreditReport.com to see when you get your chance if you don’t live out west. Update 12/9: I corrected the above URLs.… Read More »
The Baltimore Sun published an excellent, detailed article on expressive speech synthesis [requires free registration] that focuses mostly on work going on at IBM. The resulting speech synthesizer would be not only be able to laugh, cough, pause for a breath, and say uh and um, but would also be able to smoothly switch between… Read More »
My main experience with XML-based programming languages has been with VoiceXML. One nice advantage of an XML-based language is that the syntax checker is essentially free, assuming the language provides a DTD, or preferably a Schema. Of course, most language compilers and interpreters also come with a syntax checker, so the DTD/Schema advantage is primarily… Read More »
I previously posted on getting the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo working on Fedora Core 1. The biggest problem was getting the right NVIDIA video card drivers installed. Now that I’ve upgraded to Fedora Core 2 on my desktop, I have given up on the Livna NVIDIA drivers and am now using NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers. The… Read More »
If you’re a fan of O’Reilly (the book publisher, not the obnoxious lout on Fox who is discounted by nearly everyone), you should check out the big sale on O’Reilly books at BookPool. They have over 500 O’Reilly published computer books on sale for 43% off. Though I already have more books than I could… Read More »