January « 2009 « mihai.ibanescu.net

Archive for January, 2009

January 25th orienteering

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Another fun event with Backwoods OK. Great turnout (partly due to my friend Marty Wesley bringing a group of 30 that courageously adventured on the orange course, despite the low temperatures.
Vladimir added a 1km leg (which is *long* in orienteering terms, for a course 7.1km total, with 15 controls on top of start/finish). I happened to run that leg with no problem, but I did do some mistakes early on. The time splits will tell the whole story when they get published.

As usual, 35°F (almost 2°C) doesn’t mean much as soon as you start running, but it was a great feat for Vladimir, Tanya and Michael to man the start/finish shelter the whole time.

The maps printed at Kinko’s worked great too, I could not tell the difference from the ones BOK produces in general (using a special paper and printer) until I looked at them side by side.

Posted in Orienteering, Sports | No Comments »

python 2.6 lameness

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Python 2.5 added a new field, “message”, to the base exception class.

Python 2.6 deprecates it.

We have code (using python 2.4) that was setting “message” and “status” (related to HTTP) in a perfectly legitimate way, that now spews warnings.

Excuse me, why do I have to change code that was working just fine?

Posted in Babbling | 1 Comment »

Check Engine Light

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

The check engine light in my 2004 Matrix came on yesterday morning. I was kinda alarmed, so I stopped at an Advance Auto Parts. They helpfully checked the code in the OBD2 and turned out it was the first oxigen sensor.

I picked up a universal Bosch oxigen sensor (the OE one was not in stock and $30 more expensive). Last night I got it installed – took me about an hour because I didn’t cut the wires long enough, and the PosiLock wire splicing that was included in the kit was a pain to get right.

After installing it, I started the engine – the check engine light was still on. I was hoping it will turn itself off while driving to work this morning, but after about 10 minutes it didn’t. So I called the store and they asked if I did reset the computer (remove one of the battery connectors, preferrably the negative, for 3-5 minutes).

That seems to have done the trick – funny this step was not included in the directions.

Total cost: $75 parts, 1 hour labor.

Posted in Babbling | 1 Comment »

The king is dead, long live the king!

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

As we here at rPath are trying to embrace standards [1], I got to work on CIM again. Kind of a deja-vu since, in a previous life, I started to write Cimbiote – a way to write CIM providers in python.

Cimbiote did not go anywhere in the past 2 years and a half, so I dusted it off and started to play with it. As it turns out, major pieces were missing: the ability to create references, support for associations etc.

When trying to add reference support, I found out from the sblim mailing list that there is still hope in the world. Today I finished packaging cmpi-bindings=contrib.rpath.org@rpl:2 and wrote a simple plugin that does not do much, but was enough to prove far superior to cimbiote.

[1] You, in the back row, stop chuckling. We all know that standards are wonderful things, as Tigger would say.

Posted in Applications, Linux | 4 Comments »