Let It Snow
It’s funny when you read to the bottom of a story thinking something and there’s a comment at the bottom saying the same thing. Why is the EPA talking about pump prices when passing regulations?
This has been a rough two weeks around the office, with reductions in the overall local Finance/IT force of over 50%. My area is not really impacted too much, but everyone pretty much already officially knows if their job is going away or not. I’m still not sure how I would handle it myself, with a big systems migration coming up later in the year. It’s kind of a train-the-replacement-computer situation, so I have trouble seeing a better way to do it than to just communicate like they did.
On a happier note, I’m pleased to say my secret project has been deployed in live testing as of yesterday evening. It also appears to work (to the extent that features are complete). While I’m not reluctant to announce it before it reaches feature-complete, it’s at the level where stuff doesn’t work and I know it doesn’t work and it needs to work.
I wisely pushed it out into Apache/WSGI world earlier than I did for Efendi, since I had some last-minute problems getting happy with mod_wsgi during that project. And it seems like I am unwittingly writing more and more Python 2.6 and above code. Debian Lenny is still on Python 2.5.
In unrelated news, I got an MP3 file to play via a Windows DLL call from Python yesterday, which was just completely frightening. Like seeing your old professor on Fear Factor or something: it just seems like they’re far too smart to be doing something so dumb. But it might come in handy down the road. I’ve been wanting a client/server MP3 player that you can control over the console. That might sound ridiculous, but when you’re coding it might save a few window flips (which on a netbook pays fast dividends). Plus, it’s cool. Somehow.
And also: Win2VNC. I just realized riding in the taxi this morning that Win2VNC would allow you to have full, like-native mouse and keyboard access to a media center PC as long as you had a laptop with you in the room.
Unfortunately, the only computer available to us that can patch into this wacko PAL television is my netbook (Intel graphics, who woulda thunk). The MacBook just requires a few words of hoodoo upon plugin, and the Sony only works when you’ve had another computer plugged into the TV before and haven’t changed the Source since then.
How I figured that out and didn’t understand the drain mechanism on my bathtub for six months is beyond me. Of course, why a bathtub needs a drain mechanism is also beyond me. şöyle böyle. I’m still waiting on a few explanatory memos from Europe.
Anyway, the most logical “remote control” in the house is the most convenient to have running the show.
Stunningly, H.264 is taxing enough to decode I had to turn down the video quality in VLC (quite a bit of voodoo on its own) to keep it from skipping and rebuffering. Locally.
I guess that gets me mostly caught up to the present day’s events. This weekend’s project is to figure out what you’re actually supposed to wear on a safari if you aren’t Dr. Livingston.