So OpenSUSE11.4 was out this week. As the Jedi said here: gah! suse is never totally easy Indeed. I thought I’d do an online upgrade, so I scheduled this to happen when I was in the office and therefore had a fast Internet link available. I applied all the remaining 11.3 updates, configured the three…
Read More Specified technical incidentThings to get out of the data in this scraper of mine: for each lobby, the monthly meeting counts, degrees in the weighted multigraph, impact factor (i.e. graph degree/meetings to give an idea of productivity), most met ministers, most met departments, topics. For each ministry, meeting counts, most met lobbies, most discussed topics. For each…
Read More Self-binding note: lobby metricsSo I was moaning about the Government and the release of lists of meetings with external organisations. Well, what about some action? I’ve written a scraper that aggregates all the existing data and sticks it in a sinister database. At the moment, the Cabinet Office, DEFRA, and the Scottish Office have coughed up the files…
Read More so you want to know who’s lobbying?Progress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakOh Gawd, this is precisely one of the things I hate about Symbian S60 development. OK, so I’ve now got a version of the PythonForS60 runtime that doesn’t require a note from my parents or Jack Straw or God or someone to use GPS; but at some point they’ve pushed out an update to the…
Read More a pain in the arse…If you want to upload something to rapidshare.com, quickly, and you only have command-line access, what do you do? This script was promising, but failed on line 30 because a regular expression didn’t match on something that turned out to be an empty (NoneType) object. I replaced this code:def upload(self): sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect((“rapidshare.com”,…
Read More command-line rapidshare uploadYou may have noticed that the Viktorfeed is down. The server it runs on was updated last night to the new version of Debian, including a new Python installation, and Something Went Wrong involving the conversion of strings to struct_time values. If you do this on my laptop:Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 10 2008, 18:01:57)[GCC 4.2.1…
Read More failWhat with things like this, the LibDems’ drive to collect members of the scientific-technical intelligentsia at a secret location in Kazakhstan (surely it must be a….), it’s surely time to shake up my ORGANISE project – a messaging and task scheduling system for organisations of all kinds that implements a Stafford Beer viable system approach.…
Read More ORGANISE: a reappraisalOK, so I was feeling sufficiently foolish to try and install the all-new version of Python for Symbian S60 phones. Not least because of rumours that things like the Location API (i.e. “all the interesting or useful stuff”) have been liberated from the finger-waggy signing process… Unfortunately, Nokia has shipped it without completing the same…
Read More Nokia Software Distribution FAILJust to say that the Viktorfeed/Google Maps mashup is now working, and it’s here. Relatedly, the URL for the GeoRSS feed is changing; replace seagrass.goatchurch.org.uk/viktorfeed.xml with www.harrowell.org.uk/viktorfeed.xml.
Read More participatory panopticon python programming post