Software

As you are probably aware, there is a lot of Windows malware that makes your PC load more slowly, have annoying popup windows or even steal your data and files.

Recently, I discovered a fantastic program that can help you get rid of all this. It is Sandboxie. Sandboxie allows you to run programs in a protected area of your computer (a sandbox), so they can’t write anywhere.

I’m working on a new Django project at the moment, and it uses the ContentTypes framework to refer to any model in the project. The problem with doing this is that the ContentType objects that are created have random IDs, so if you dump your database objects into a fixture, the ContentType objects those refer to will not be what you initially expected.

After a few days of searching and finding no solution, I got suggestions from a few people that I can use signals to detect when the objects were being created.

These last few days I have been busy trying to install PyCuda for Windows, but Windows sucks a bit in these things, so it took quite a bit of time. This is a post documenting my Odyssey.

First of all, I had no luck at all with Python 2.6. After two days I got it to compile, but it couldn’t load the module, so I installed 2.5 again.

Today I needed to rescue the data on a hard disk brought to me, so I used GNU ddrescue (what else?) to create an image of the disk. As soon as the image was done, I discovered that the disk contained a FAT32 partition, which I wanted to mount.

After the amazingly successful omnisync, it is once again time to present you of another creation of the inimitable Poromenos Studios.

This time, it’s Dead Man’s Switch. As you’re probably aware, everyone carries valuable information in their heads. It might be about their work, financial information, etc. If anything were to happen to them, this information would be lost, unfortunately.

This is where Dead Man’s Switch comes in.

It is once again time to shake the world from its very foundations with my latest creation. I present to you… omnisync.

omnisync is a file synchroniser (something like rsync), only it’s not built to synchronise just files, but also anything else. It’s extensible through a simple plugin architecture, and you can have it synchronise anything to anything within a few hours.

I just encoded my Futurama DVDs to put on my iPod, but it’s a real hassle adding tags to every single file separely, so I created a script to do it for me. I had actually written this before, but I forgot it at home, so I had no option but to rewrite it.

The script (written in Python) will search the filenames for “sXXeXX” and look up the episode name on IMDB, and then will rename the file as “Show name – SXXEXX – Episode name.extension”.

Lately I’ve been looking for a good way to explain OpenID to people, since they need to know what it is to sign on Moneygement, which uses it. I haven’t been able to find a good guide, so I decided to write one, and here it is.

These last few days I have been trying to get my new pet project (Moneygement, it’s going to be a free budget/finances management web app) going. So far I have implemented the OpenID signins (yay for OpenID, I love it, I hope everything that is, was and ever will be uses it) and I have gathered some ideas on the functionality.

Today I read an article on reddit about vi and vim, and it got me thinking. This editor is almost as old as mankind itself, paintings of the vi UI were found in caves along with the cryptic writing “:wq”. People have been using it for as long as anyone can remember. Wars have been waged for it (mostly with the church of Emacs, what with the crusades and all). One of the most influential editors of all time, and I don’t know how to use it. This is unacceptable.