Yesterday, a customer of mine emailed me that the Python program I had written for him didn't work. The last line of the traceback [...]

After a little more walking, with a dense patch of coffee plants to our left, we came upon a wall to our left, and a T-junction in front of us. I decided that we would go to the right, into the direction of San Marcos de [...]

I woke up quite late in the morning, and was not feeling very well. I asked Esme if we could go out for a short walk to clear my mind, and to get out of the house; away from the computer and work. I already had an idea where I wanted to go; I wanted to explore the very green part south of Coatepec in [...]

Just before noon I found out where our new pet, a kitten we bought last Tuesday in the petshop, was hiding: behind my Dell Vostro, on top of some cables with its paws close to the on/off switch of the power strip to which my computer, monitor, etc. are [...]

If you use SMTP to send email using MIME::Lite from your Perl program and use not the default SMTP port 25 but specify one as [...]

A few days after we had arrived in our new house in Coatepec a female scorpions I suspected to be gravid - she had mated over a year ago with a male of the same species - was no longer visible. I even couldn't find her under a large stone, her favorite hiding place. Nor could I see the entry of a burrow, [...]

Soon after I started Perl help in exchange for books it became a huge success. At first I was expecting a lot of "can you please do my home work" requests but those have been rare. The majority of help requests are split between people who want me to do a code review and people who need a tool that assists [...]

Today I needed to be able to enter a description of an image in a Python program. I hadn't enough experience with PyQt: the Python bindings for Qt, yet; I had only browsed a few chapters in Mark Summerfield's excellent (so far) "Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt". I did, however, have quite some [...]

The solution he describes uses proxychains. While it's possible to configure a proxy in a configuration file that's read by the subversion client, I prefer the solution Oliver describes, also because it can work with any network [...]

At the end of the day it started to rain, stronger and stronger. I took Alice up to our bedroom to look at the rain. A little later, when I was back behind the computer, and Esme and Alice were up, in the bedroom, there was a very loud [...]

At the end of the afternoon Esme complained about her Creative Zen Nano not playing the mp3 podcasts I had downloaded for her last week in the correct order. It soon turned that some files had an extra leading zero in the filename, in total 3 digits, which caused the podcasts being played out of order [...]

I had started VirtualBox by selecting the Sun xVM VirtualBox entry in the System Tools submenu of the Applications menu. Next I clicked on the "blue sun" icon with the text "New" underneath. This opened the "Create New Virtual Machine" dialog [...]

Over two years ago I created my first virtual machine running Windows XP. Back then I used the free VMware Player running on Windows XP. Nowadays, my main development operating system is Ubuntu 8.10 most of the time. Yet, for some projects I still have to fall back to Windows XP. VirtualBox had been [...]

After a quick examination I noticed that some cells had their data encoded as UCS2. So I decided to use the excellent Encode module to convert the data to UTF-8. At the top of the Perl program I [...]

Today, around half past four in the afternoon I received an email, asking if I happen to know the Dell part number for the ATI Radeon 2400 XT card. So I checked my gmail account which had a quote from Dell, and emailed the Dell part number, 320-6008, [...]

Earlier this month I downloaded several Dutch comics, Suske en Wiske, as cbr files. I own the original dead tree copies, but they are still in the Netherlands, and I own too many to ask my mom to take them with her when she visits us. Besides, we're running out of storage space in our little [...]

Today the weather was fantastic in Xalapa, so around noon Esme decided it was a good moment for Alice to have some water fun on the flat roof of our apartment. Our daughter Alice had just recovered from a nasty infection, probably rotavirus, and certainly could use the [...]

In the early afternoon, when I started Pidgin I got an error message at the bottom of my contact [...]

Today I wanted to burn a video DVD on Ubuntu 8.10. I had a directory dvd with a subdirectory VIDEO_TS. The latter containing the following [...]

When developing software, mostly Perl programs, on Windows XP I use the command line a lot. And one of the commands I have learned to rely on is start. Now and then I have to open a certain directory in the explorer program, for example to drag and drop a zip file to Thunderbird in order to email it [...]