Old on Tony Andrew Meyer

Tools

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 11:28:57 +1200

(Moved over from my Massey site. Future entries will be separate, but in the Tools category). These are the tools that I regularly use, and which I would obviously recommend: Coding

Python is my preferred programming language.
Mark Hammond’s pywin32 extensions for Python are invaluable, especially the PythonWin IDE.
py2exe is perfect for creating Python executables.
Inno Setup is a great, free, installer builder for Windows.
SpamBayes is the best spam filter there is .
Kodos is fantastic for testing/creating regular expressions (particularly ones to be used in Python). [more]
wxPython is my preferred Python GUI development library.

Editors I’ve given up on the editors I was using, and for the moment, I’m just using PythonWin for everything. The search may resume… PhD Research

Universal Student Allowances: A Better Solution

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:09:57 +1200

Students’ Associations, like my own ASA and the NZUSA, are continually pushing for a “universal student allowance”. This is quite clearly an unworkable solution - not even the Labour Party is in favour of it - and nor is it a desirable one. [Note that throughout this document, student refers to tertiary students. Secondary, primary, and pre-primary students have other support mechanisms.] Problems with a universal student allowance The main problem is that it blindly encourages anyone to become a tertiary student, without any consideration of whether they should be, and whether they need help. It doesn’t even penalise for poor performance (unless you fail half your papers, you still get the allowance in the following year).

After Hours Sign-in Books

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:52:35 +1200

A recent Massey Albany announcement:

As part of our Health & Safety requirement it has been necessary to provide after hour sign in books in all multi-storey buildings on campus.These have now been put in place and can be found either by the after hour entry doors or in the case of the Quad A and Atrium buildings close to the lift. Please make yourself familiar with the location of the books and ensure that all staff and visitors entering and leaving the building after hours sign the book. Remember they are in place for your safety and in the unlikely event of an emergency they will assist security or emergency services in determining who is in the building.

Visiting Australia (Passport Requirements)

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:43:48 +1200

I’m visiting Australia (just for the day) next week, and realised last night that I foolishly have let my passport reach the stage where it expires in just over two months. I know that many countries require the expiry to be a certain amount of time after arriving (e.g. six months) and wondered if I would have to speedily renew my passport (an extra $75 for the speed, and taking three days plus travel to and from the passports office, which would cut it close).

Stability of email addresses

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:32:17 +1200

Massey’s ITS department have been at it again (see also the comments about their security blunder earlier this year - somewhat patched up now). Ever since email began, it has been customary for an email address to take the form username@domain - for example, I have a username “ta-meyer” with which I log into Ihug, and so I have an email address ta-meyer@ihug.co.nz. Massey (staff) usernames typically come in the form initial(s)surname (e.g. my name is Tony Andrew Meyer, so my username is “tameyer”). As such, you would expect my Massey email address to be tameyer@massey.ac.nz (just as you find my web page by putting Massey’s address, then a tilde (for ‘home’) then my username, to get http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer). Until some time in the last week, you would have been right. You could also have used t.a.meyer@massey.ac.nz (note the dots), but it didn’t really make as much sense (“t.a.meyer” is no good as a username, anywhere at Massey), and is more difficult for people to remember. Just recently, however, mail to username@massey.ac.nz (e.g. tameyer@massey.ac.nz) has started to bounce with an “unknown user” error. So what? At first glance, this isn’t too much of a problem. Some bureaucrat somewhere likes to have dots in their email (maybe their name is Sam Ted Upid or something ), and decides that it’s too confusing to have more than one valid way to do it (in some ways, a valid point). So we all start using dots more. The problem is that this is not expected behaviour, and a change from what has worked in the past. As such, there are people who will be using the username@massey.ac.nz form of address to contact people at Massey. All their mail will bounce. And not just bounce. It will bounce with a “no such user” error, without any indication of why this might be. The thing about email addresses, at least today, is that they need to be stable. That’s why I’m still with Ihug - because I can’t lose my ta-meyer@ihug.co.nz address. Clever people know that they could just do a search with (e.g.) Google and find a valid address for me, but not all people are clever (and somewhat fewer than you might think in an university environment <0.5 wink>). Worse is that to log in to the email (POP3) server, you need to use your username (i.e. no dots) - the dotted version does not work. This flies in the face of established practice. It’s not a problem for Exchange users, because they authenticate in a whole different way, and that covers the majority of Massey staff, but it will be for others. Worse, still, is that ITS’s own help pages give instructions for setting up your mail client (e.g. Eudora) that are now just plain wrong! Since you have to log in with your username (no dots), you need to enter in a reply address (with dots) or your return address will just be (as you would expect) username@massey.ac.nz. The solution The obvious solution is just to go back to how it was, when the system worked like to expected it to. However, if there’s too much red tape blocking the way (just like you would expect in an university environment), then there was a correct way to go about doing this: Tell everyone that it’s going to happen, a long time (at least several months) in advance. Someone from the helpdesk told me that they thought that there was notification, and there’s a slim possibility that that’s true. However, I archive all my mail (for work with SpamBayes), and there’s no sign of a message to massey-all or albany-all there. I read Massey News, too, and don’t recall seeing anything there. I even read the notices on the staffroom notice board, and saw nothing there either. Colleagues that I’ve mentioned it to aren’t aware of it either, so it’s not just me. If there was notificiation, it seems pretty likely that it was insufficient. Enhance the bounce message. At the moment it looks the same as if you emailed madeupaddress3467@massey.ac.nz. The recipient has no idea that the reason their mail is no longer getting through is because of an internal change. All that is required is adding a little note to the bounce message (about 2 minutes work) that explains the situation, and suggests trying the address with dots added in the appropriate positions. So what am I doing about it? Well, the first thing that I’m doing is that I’m going to avoid using my Massey address wherever possible. Which means I trawl through all my web pages and change those, and so on. I’ll give out a good address (my gmail tony.meyer@gmail.com address, I expect) to people at conferences, and so on. The Massey system has a not-particularly-good spam filter, so I get to be certain that I avoid that, and a doesn’t-actually-work message release system for blocked messages, and avoiding that will be nice, too. And when I leave Massey in a year and a half, as I almost certainly will, at least there isn’t much mail to follow me. I contacted the helpdesk about this. I was told that all emails have to use the dotted version, and that someone would be in touch. There’s a slim chance that things might be resolved (as above). If not, then last time the director of ITS told me to take problems to the head of ITS at Albany, so I’ll do that and see if it gets anywhere. And I suppose I’ll just let those that I know know, so that they can also correct their email addresses, if possible.

Email Quoting

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:21:28 +1200

Like many people, I deal with a lot of email every day. Something that makes it much easier to deal with is when people quote properly. Here are some guidelines (originally prepared for 139.177 / 119.177) for effective email quoting. Quoting works best if you work with plain text email and not HTML - many people prefer this, anyway, so it’s a good idea to stick with it unless you have a good reason not to. There are many varients of good quoting styles, only one of which is presented here. It doesn’t really matter which you use, as long as you use one. Why you should quote properly To put it most briefly, RFC1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) states that:

Finding libstdc++.so.6

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:12:11 +1200

When I tried to build Python 2.4.1 on doublehelix I ran into two problems:

configure wouldn’t complete, saying that it couldn’t run compiled C programs. I looked at the configure script and right before this it had something about not removing this section with autoconf 3.0:

FIXME: These cross compiler hacks should be removed for Autoconf 3.0

If not cross compiling, check that we can run a simple program.

So I went ahead and commented out that section and it ran. I suspect that this was actually caused by the second problem.

The importance of priority

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:01:46 +1200

As part of my PhD research, I have to link together a lot of separate components, many of which are running on separate machines, as they’re too much for a single one. You’d think that this was relatively simple, given that a good non-blocking synchronous socket module is part of the standard Python library. Not so! Everything always runs too slowly, even when it’s the only thing running on the machine. The first time I came across this problem, I was running the vision module and the speech module on the same machine, which communicated with the graphics module on a different one. The speech module just wouldn’t run nicely at all. Sleep()ing An obvious solution was to get the various processes to call time.sleep() every so often, so that the other processes would have a chance to do their work. This really didn’t work at all! Shutting off background processes My main machine runs a lot of stuff in the background, from my CVS server, to a VNC server, to iTunes. I wondered if some of this was causing the problem, so I shut everything that wasn’t essential down. To my surprise, this made things worse! The solution Finally, I clicked on the solution - setting the thread/process priority. By setting the vision module to have a ‘below normal’ thread priority, the speech module worked happily. Part Two Many months later, though, I ended up with the same problem - the speech module just wouldn’t work fast enough. Things were a little different, though - the speech module was the only one running on the machine, and synthesis worked ok (last time it stuttered), but the recognition was way slow. The speech module is a complex beast, because it doesn’t actually do the speech stuff itself, but uses COM to get the Microsoft Speech kit to do it. Once again, I played around with time.sleep()ing, wondering if the network traffic was what was slowing it down (because without the network traffic, it worked nicely), and lots of other things. I even tried increasing the priority of the speech process, and that just made things worse. Finally, though, I clicked to the actual problem - the speech process wasn’t the one that was doing the speech work, some other process was (accessed via COM), and that one wasn’t getting enough time. The network traffic probably made things worse because it mean that more time was allocated to the speech module process, which is the opposite of what needed to happen. So I again dropped the priority - this time of the speech module, and lo-and-behold it worked like a charm. The lesson? Be very careful to set the priorities carefully, and don’t always assume that you want a higher priority for your process. Remember that Windows will do a reasonable job of giving everyone enough time if the priorities are set right. Note that to set the process priority, the win32process.SetPriorityClass function is used, with the first parameter equal to the result of win32api.GetCurrentProcess(), but the constants needed for the second parameter are missing, even though the win32 help says they are there (I’ll submit this as a pywin32 bug). The ‘below normal’ constant is 16384. [Later: this is fixed in recent versions of pywin32] technorati tags: Coding, PhD

Reply All

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:47:42 +1200

This is primarily intended for people corresponding with me via spambayes@python.org.Those that have will have noticed my signature generally includes these lines:

--
Please always include the list (spambayes at python.org) in your replies
(reply-all), and please don't send me personal mail about SpamBayes.
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~tameyer/writing/reply_all.html explains this.

Here is an explanation of what that means, why I am asking you to do this, and how you can do it. If you don’t understand a term here, please check the list at the end for a definition, or use Google’s “define” facility to get a definition. What does this mean? What this means is that I would like you to send your reply to the spambayes@python.org address, rather than (or in addition to) my own address. I would also like you to send any new queries in the future to that same spambayes@python.org address, and not to me, even though I might have helped you in the past (unless I specifically ask/offer you to do so). Why should I do this? There are four main reasons: