Archives May 2005

Wikipedia editing is addictive too! (Try to create a simple link from a blog post and wind up writing another encyclopedia article...)


While I was writing that last blog post I wanted to link to Wikipedia entries for van der Laan, proportional systems, and a number of other things... but there's no page for proportion (architecture), so I have to create one... and then I have to go through my thesis notes looking for the various ...

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On Limiting Languages (Old images from my thesis prompt a post...)


I happened upon a description of the Plastic Number as I was noodling about doing system backups and the like. For those not familiar with it, the Plastic Number is a proportional system developed by a Dutch monk which was based on experiments to determine perceptually what we are able to distinguish and compare.

van ...

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Ah the glory of web-site design (IE sucks the lichen off the rocks...)


Day was spent on posters and web-sites and similar things. I'm still thinking that taking that extra day from last week as a flex day would be useful. Do some shopping and laundry before our guests arrive (3 extra people, (two children), in a 2 bedroom apartment for 1 or 2 months... going to be ...

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I'm really rusty! (Web-site design doesn't go spectacularly well...)


I couldn't sleep this evening, so I did a bit of work setting up the Cinemon website. The design is quite crude at the moment. I'd intended to have the splash-screen background be 3 images, similar to the poster, but then I realised I'd have to muck about more to do that, so I ...

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A better class of nightmare (Simple, direct, with inventions bonus...)


Apparently the movie last night really affected me. Night was peppered with dreams of fighting to be respected, fighting to survive, etceteras. Of the inventions I can remember, one was a monitor for store shelves that simply records when someone breaks the plane, the other is an old invention that was getting field-tested (well, used) ...

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Why am I home on a Saturday night? (This is just pitiful...)


I keep thinking I'll sit down to work on PyOpenGL and having waves of ennui (can ennui form a wave? more of a sluggish oil-slicked wash than a wave, I guess...) wash away the desire. So, I watched "Always Outnumbered", which was perfect, because I've recently been getting a bad string of movies where they ...

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Wow, a whole day on graphics (I'm so out of practice...)


One of the interesting things about design is that theory tends to be too slow as a mechanism for accomplishing it in the real world. While you could work everything out from first principles every time you wanted to place a piece of text on a sheet of paper, you'd get out-competed by the guy ...

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Run Snake Run (A Python hotshot profile loading/display GUI)


Well, as mentioned earlier (yesterday), it takes far too long to load the HotShot profiler dumps. So, I wrote my own little loader/viewer package. It processes about 70,000 records/second, which lets it load a profile fairly quickly, but it's not blazingly fast by any means.

What makes it useful/cool is that it loads the dump ...

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Profile first, then optimise (Surprising what you find with actual measurements...)


Biggest event of the day was discovering that 30% of total work in the system was being done in a __cmp__ method that was doing the equivalent of "if x is y" when everything was said and done. It appears, in the end, to have been the ultimate source of the slowdowns that I've spent ...

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Wasn't I supposed to stop working back then (Look ma, hour-per-day discipline falling apart...)


Wanted to add some debugging code to see if I could catch some bugs during the evening's operation... turned into rather a lot of bug-fixing and minor feature implementation work that bring's the day's total to some entirely improper number of hours (sorry hands). I have to stop now or I won't be able to ...

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