Tim Bray explains why XML doesn’t suck.

Earlier tonight I loaded DimDim on my home server and did a quick test. Looks pretty good.

I was able to connect to it from my desktop and stream a presentation (audio, slides, desktop sharing, etc.) to my laptop on the LAN as well as to Nate over the net. According to IPCop it was using about 70Kbps each way on average, bursting up to about 300Kbps each way at times.

After I do some more testing, I’ll try to post some instructions on how to get it set up. It wasn’t hard, but I did have to switch my Java VM from Blackdown to Sun’s Java VM.

More later…

IEC is a python library “designed to help you automate and control an Internet Explorer window.” Quoth the project page:

You can use this library to navigate to web pages, read the values of various HTML elements, set the values of checkboxes, text boxes, radio buttons etc., click on buttons and submit forms.

Sounds cool… if you use IE. Bleh.

If you check the built-in help screens in Pine, it says that you can use the H key to view full headers for email. But if you try it, it says that command isn’t available. For some reason, you need to enable that command in the setup screens before it will work.

Press Main Menu, Setup, Config, and then scroll down to the following and select it (X):

[ Advanced Command Preferences ] ... [X] enable-full-header-cmd

Exit the setup screen (saving changes) and you should be set.

As might know, I recently completed the Couch-to-5K running plan and used a Garmin Forerunner 205 to track my progress. The Garmin Training Center software for the device isn’t too bad, but it would be nice to not have to rely on it.

Well as it turns out, Bob Rudis wrote a Python script to read the gtc database files:

If you’ve got python and it’s sqlite library installed, then this script will be a half-decent example of how to pull data from “.gtc” database for each entry in the stored history. If not, have no fear, I hope to release a small app to let you extract the data on your own and I’m still thinking about that widget.

The cool part is that, as Bob pointed out earlier, the Training Center database files are nothing more than SQLite files! How awesome is that?

Urwid is a “console user interface library” for Python, and it looks pretty darn cool. If you check out the examples, you can get an idea of what you can do with it.

Don’t ask why, but I was attempting to install Apache 2.2 on my Windows desktop tonight. Unfortunately after double-clicking the installer, it would give me the following error:

After quite a bit of hunting I found a rather odd solution. If you disable all of your network interfaces (I had two running) and try the installer again… it seems to work fine.

I have no idea why that works.

I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook to manage my TODO list for a while.

Yes, I know… everyone complains about Outlook, but for me it fits the bill about 90% of the time. The tasks are easy to add, there’s a place to add notes, and it keeps track of when I complete tasks. But it is very limited in overall functionality, and it doesn’t scale well… with lots of old completed tasks cluttering the UI after a while.

I’m a picky person, and it’s just not quite right. So the hunt begins for the perfect TODO list…

(more…)

Or at least that’s what one person (troll?) claimed on the pygame-users mailing list recently.

Personally I think the first reply was the best. :)

I’ve been hearing good things about the Dabo Desktop Application Framework. Here’s the description from the Dabo website:

…It’s not YAWF (yet another web framework). There are plenty of excellent web frameworks out there, so if that’s what you are looking for, Dabo isn’t for you. But there are almost no desktop application frameworks out there, and if you want to create applications that run on Windows, OS X or Linux, Dabo is for you!

Other than a little PyGame stuff last year, I’ve never really done any desktop/wxPython coding. Perhaps I should try it.