Here is a very interesting excerpt from a speech by Major General Smedley Butler (USMC). You can read the whole thing (the excerpt is quite short), but this paragraph just about sums it up for me:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

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This link has some very interesting tidbits that could help you to speed up your Python code.

In other news, I’ve updated the binary Radeon DRI suspend/resume-capable drivers on my dri_resume page.

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As I was slaving away at my trusty Linux workstation today, the 30G IBM DTLA 307030 IDE hard drive started making extremely upsetting noises. These are not the kind of noises one expects from a smoothly operating hard-drive, but rather from some mechanical device in the throes of a messy death. Yes, this is one of those IBM hard drives and Paul confirmed that it was exactly this noise that his IBM hard drive made shortly before it went to heaven…

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This is probably the most elegant euphemism I’ve heard in a very long time:

“Wat de geachte afgevaardigde daar zegt staat op gespannen voet met de werkelijkheid.” which is short for “Hij LIEGT!”.

Vive l’Hollandais!

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>>> def someFunc(someParam, someDict={}):
...    someDict[someParam] = someParam
...    print someDict
...
>>> someFunc('hello1')
{'hello1': 'hello1'}
>>> someFunc('hello2')
{'hello2': 'hello2', 'hello1': 'hello1'}
>>> someFunc('hello3')
{'hello2': 'hello2', 'hello3': 'hello3', 'hello1': 'hello1'}
>>>

The moral of this story is: be careful when using default parameters for dictionaries, lists and such like. One could be forgiven for thinking that the default parameter gets initialised with every invocation, but that is clearly not the case.

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I spend quite a chunk of my time hacking on VTK (the Visualization ToolKit), one of the better examples of open source.

I’m particularly proud of the fix I made today though, as it’s quite deep in the VTK object hierarchy. Shows you how much it can help to construct an isolated test case that breaks something before you start debugging. First I present the problem along with my test case (I ran into the problem whilst hacking on large GUI+VTK project) and then, after considerable amounts of Rooibos tea, the solution.

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In order to try and improve my pitiful Chess abilities, I’ve started playing online chess-by-email games via RedHotPawn. If you would like an ego boost, get yourself an account and challenge me. It shouldn’t take you more than a few moves to take my king out. My login is, you guessed it, “cpbotha”.

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EUR166 for a Via EPIA C3 800, EUR110 for a Starex Mini-ITX case, EUR55 for 256MB of PC133 SDRAM, EUR57 for a LiteOn 16x48x DVD/CD-ROM, EUR115 for a Western Digital 80GB HDD and EUR50 for miscellaneous expenses brings me to the grand (and currently unaffordable) total of EUR553.

Maybe I should rather upgrade my home network infrastructure with a new 100Mbit/s switch and wait a few years until the components above are available for a song. :)

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A while ago, I read this fluff piece about Python. As with most fluff pieces, it was quite inane, but our anthropologist wunderkind Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier succeeded in citing Guido van Rossum incorrectly as “Rossum” instead of “Van Rossum” no less than six different times.

I went through the very tedious process of registering for a login at the offending site in order to post my thoughts in the talkback forum on this embarrassing faux pas. My post never appeared in the talkback forum, but: all except one of the incorrect citations were silently fixed.

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I have often heard the open source phenomenon (if you want to get pedantic with me about open source vs free software, start by blowing it out yer ass: I’m going to be pragmatic about it and use the two interchangably) compared to religion, but last night was the first time that I had this almost religious open source experience. In spite of all the grudges I have against organised religion, this experience was altogether quite a pleasant one.

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