When switching a Python codebase to use the dataclasses feature, added in Python 3.7, I ran into an unexpected issue when running code with Django : dates were not updating. It was actually a little more general than that: entire objects were not updating: some object variables might have contents from the current day’s run, others might have values that were set on the day the current instance of…
I’ve long been interested in Artifical Intelligence, going back to David M. Skapura’s 1996 book, Building Neural Networks) (Amazon helpfully tells me I bought the book a few days after I finished high school). I read it, but with no code samples, I was too inexperienced to turn the algorithms and theory into anything useful. When I started university a few months later, I didn’t pursue the…
The best advice I can give about Unicode and UTF -8 in Perl is: don’t worry about it. Just do what you need to do, read up on some basics , and it’ll mostly all work out. When you’re getting odd results, make sure your I/O is UTF -8 , and perhaps sprinkle a “use utf8;” at the top of your source files. And most of the time, this is just fine. Perl …
From the IRC archives of #crypt, originally from February 2008: [16:32] <halcyon> tio: tell us a story [16:35] <tio> okay [16:35] <tio> once upon a time [16:36] <tio> there was a rich emperor, the ruler of a great land [16:37] <tio> as befitted his status as leader of such a wealthy land, he had everything he could want, and was a royal pain to buy birthday presents for [16:37 …
In my last post , I described how I built my lovely (and massively overpowered) network UPS system. But it was missing something: a way to monitor the charge of the UPS . In principle, you’d use this information to tell equipment when it needs to gracefully shutdown. In practise, I’ve tried to avoid ever needing to shut down equipment by sizing it such that it can cope with any likely outages, but…
Power cuts have become a common occurrence around here, under the glamorous title of “ load-shedding “. The local electrical utility has, for some years, and for many historical reasons , experienced periodic trouble meeting the demands placed upon the electricity network. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, my area tends to go dark for about two hours, once or twice a day. This…