I am on a lit­tle va­ca­tion. I will be back next sun­day.

Al­so, I*ve been quite busy, and the cou­ple of hours a longish pst takes sim­ply was not there.

And noth­ing in­ter­est­ing hap­pened, so no short sto­ries ei­ther ;-)

The Leon Coun­ty Sher­if­f's Of­fice has ar­rest­ed two men in con­nec­tion with an Au­gust rob­bery of the Petro gas sta­tion, 3626 Ma­han Drive. The gun­men stole cash out of the reg­is­ter and cig­a­rettes be­fore leav­ing the store, head­ed in an un­known di­rec­tion, said Lt. Lin­da But­ler, spokes­woman for the Sher­if­f's Of­fice. The Rob­bery Task Force Unit, fol­low­ing a lead, was able to con­nect two men to the rob­bery and ar­rest­ed Mar­cus Kitchen­s, 21, and Rober­to Alsi­na, 23. Both were charged with armed rob­bery.

THe first time ev­er I found out about some­one with my same name, and he*s in jail :-P

I de­cid­ed to bring my of­fice PC in­to the XXI cen­tu­ry by adding a few USB ports to it.

I turned it of­f. I plugged in the board. I start­ed screw­ing it... and dropped the screw in­side it.

That has hap­pened a bil­lion times be­fore, so I'm not too wor­ried... un­til sud­den­ly the com­put­er turns it­self on, and a aw­ful smell comes from the ISA end of the mobo, along with acrid, black smoke.

I pull the plug, and it does­n't work. It seems to boot, but it makes a con­stant beep­ing sound.

Key­board er­ror.

I put an­oth­er key­board.

It all work­s, ex­cept the pow­er LED is now al­ways on as soon as I plug it. But the com­put­er is­n't. When I press the pow­er switch, the pow­er LED gets brighter, then it start­s.

I won­der what ex­act­ly I burned :-)

A short tu­to­ri­al ex­plain­ing how to cre­ate re­us­able wid­gets us­ing PyQt.

In a whim, I checked out kde­bind­ings/d­cop­python from KDE's CVS.

I see the READ­ME: dcopy­thon is bro­ken

Then I said to my­self: maybe I can fix it. And you know what? It seems to be not bro­ken! :-)

At least for sim­ple da­ta type­s, that is.

dcop­python lets your python pro­gram be­come a DCOP serv­er or clien­t.

A DCOP serv­er is ca­pa­ble of be­ing con­trolled by KDE's kd­cop, and is a very sim­ple way to make your ap­pli­ca­tion ex­ter­nal­ly script­able.

A DCOP client is some­thing that con­tacts a DCOP server, so that means you can con­trol and script KDE ap­pli­ca­tions (or oth­er DCOP server­s) from python script­s.

The neat­est thing here is that this stuff does­n't re­quire Qt!

I in­tend to use it to make some of my apps ex­ter­nal­ly script­able with­out PyKDE.