http://www.events.runningroom.com/site/?raceId=4396&eventId=15086&vrindex=4

So far the lesson seems to be that Triathlon training is better preparation for running than for Triathlon itself.  I came 95th in the Muskoka sprint triathlon, 4th overall (and 1st in the men’s category) in the Barrie Rotary Club fun run, and 5th in the Canada Day 5k.  Some of my results are here.

The girls competed in their first kids triathlon, and did great!
Should post some pictures too, I guess.

> sudo yum install openssh-clients

One step close to the ideal thin client!

Heather bought this for me partly to encourage me to write more, so watch out for an increased posting frequency.

A useful trick I discovered recently is the following.  Say you’re trying to use a COM interface such as Microsoft Message Queuing.  You can create a message queue object as follows:

import win32com, win32com.client

serverInfo = win32com.client.Dispatch("MSMQ.MSMQQueueInfo")

However, the next step requires constants from the messaging API such as MQ_SEND_ACCESS.  These can be made available to win32com.client.constants in two ways.  One involves running makepy, but a more robust alternative is as follows:

import win32com, win32com.client
win32com.client.gencache.EnsureDispatch("MSMQ.MSMQQueueInfo")
win32com.client.gencache.EnsureDispatch("MSMQ.MSMQMessage")
from win32com.client import constants
serverInfo = Dispatch("MSMQ.MSMQQueueInfo")
serverInfo.FormatName = <format name>
return serverInfo.Open(constants.MQ_SEND_ACCESS, constants.MQ_DENY_NONE)

The order is important.  Once EnsureDispatch has been called, win32com.client.constants can be imported and will have the correct values available.

• Downloaded the Lua source from Lua.org.
• Created a Visual Studio DLL project containing all the source files apart from lua.c and luac.c
• Built this DLL to create lua.dll
• Created another project with just lua.c, and linked to the above DLL
• Built this project to create lua.exe. Now I’ve got a lua environment.
• Downloaded the luabind source from Rasterbar Software. This seems to be based on the powerful Boost.Python library, which I’ve had a lot of success with in the past.
• Created another Visual Studio project for luabind, add the luabind source files and link with lua.dll.  Luabind does come with a bjam make file, but I usually find bjam a complete headache to use.
• Created yet another project with the sample code from the luabind tutorial, built and linked against the luabind library and lua.dll

After all this, (and several hours of tweaking linker settings) I’ve now got the tutorials working to the extent that I can now do two things.  I can expose C++ functions into a Lua program, which is very handy, and something I’ve found very useful in Python.  But of course, the big draw to Lua is that it can be embedded in an existing C or C++ program!  So now I’ve also got to the point where I can contain a Lua interpreter within a C++ application, pass a string of Lua code to that interpreter to be executed, and even let provide the interpeter with the ability to call out to C++ functions elsewhere in the program.

So despite the the hoops I had to jump through, I think this could be a very powerful environment.  Now I just need to learn the Lua language itself, but as they say, if you can’t learn a new language in a weekend you shouldn’t call yourself a programmer.

http://wordle.net/