My sleep schedule is totally out of whack. I cannot sleep before 3 AM
(sometimes I stay awake until 7 AM), then I cannot get up before noon.
As a result I have more free time for hacking. Today I tried to play around
with Metacity's compositor, with some mixed
success. I also built a patched
FBReader with a numeric page indicator tweaked to the size and position of
my liking (screenshot). Bzr rocks for maintaining branches!
eazysvn also got a facelift today.
It is now installable with easy_install.
<rant>
I do not like easy_install. It wants to install stuff into
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. That location is reserved for Debian
packages. A sensible default would be /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
or, preferably, somewhere in my home directory, with the caveat that I'll have to
set up PYTHONPATH myself. You can force easy_install to do more or less what
you want, but that involves reading tons of documentation, invoking arcane
multi-thousand line scripts, or sacrificing small animals. Not my
definition of "easy".
</rant>
Last night I submitted a patch to add
a tiny help topic to bzr. Before that, nights were dedicated to
zope.testing and
pyspacwar.
In the mean time, actual paying work suffers. Karmic retribution for those
three 11-and-a-half hour days I spent at work during the first week of January?
No, just lack of willpower to force myself to go to sleep (or wake up) early
instead of, for example, blogging.
Did some hacking on the Zope 3 test runner:
- Fixed test failures on Python 2.4.4.
- Fixed some typos in comments and strings.
- Make test.py not trap Ctrl+C so eagerly.
- Make test.py -fu run both functional and unit tests.
- Make test.py -s src/pkg run the tests in the pkg package.
- Make test.py --list-modules list the test modules that would be
imported.
The riskier features I've implemented in separate branches (test-fu, filter-by-dirs,
list-modules).
Subversion is not very good at handling branches, but that's where ezswitch.py and ezmerge.py come in.
The ultimate goal is to retire the SchoolTool
test runner and switch to the Zope 3 one (the SchoolTool project already
did so). There are two remaining features that I would miss:
We finished a rather major restructuring of the internals of a system last
week at work. I finally got to experimentally test Martin Fowler's refactoring techniques (small steps) on a
big change. It was fun and I tended to stay late at work because I wanted to
finish what I was working on. I missed that feeling. Oh, and Subversion is
good, but merging is a big inconvenience.
During nights I worked on PySpaceWar: added sound effects, support
for background music (but didn't look for freely redistributable soundtracks
yet), some visual effects, some more configuration options. And once again
playing the game became more interesting than coding it. I can beat the
computer with 100 kills to its 50-60. I should release a new version soon.
Today I discovered the cause of a long-standing problem of random reboots
of my Nokia 770. Turns out FBReader leaks file descriptors, and once the
system runs out, some important process crashes and the device reboots. A
patch and a fixed .deb are on my FBReader
page (of course I also sent the patch upstream).
Meanwhile Nokia released the N800. *drool*.
Twice as much RAM, twice as much "disk" space (flash memory, actually), faster
CPU, two full-size SD slots, interesting software updates. I want one, but
since Nokia only sells them in a few countries, I'll probably have to wait
until somebody I know can bring one to me.
