Author archives: Mike
Simple caching DNS client for Linux (DNS delay on Sympatico is driving me nuts)
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Tuxedo.
As I'm working over at Soni's I'm using her Sympatico DSL connection. It works reasonably fast when you're actually transferring a file, but DNS resolution takes 5 or 10 seconds. When every test makes 3 or 4 lookups you wind up with a very slow test suite.
What I'd really love is a system-level caching ...
Really need to get a "too far" alert (Too easy to fix just one figure flaw too many...)
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Knight Errant.
Sometime on Saturday (or was that Sunday) I fixed a minor problem. Just refactoring away, found a bit of code that shouldn't be there, refactored it, moved onto the next thing that needed refactoring. I was working on the UI code at the time (which doesn't have a useful set of unit tests) and kept ...
Long weekend of work hasn't yet gelled (People seem to want to have a holiday...)
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Knight Errant.
Been trying to make this a productive weekend for the company. So far not going particularly well. Just sort of "lost" today with grocery shopping for dinner on Monday, little visits (spoiled a surprise gift because I thought that the recipients knew about it :( ), another shopping trip to get food for Soni's place, ...
I was soooo wrong (Brave New Waves recording is so worthwhile!)
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Vindaloo.
I'm pretty close to blissing out... experimental music in huge doses is just the way to start the day. It's strange, but I almost feel like I'm growing as a person as I'm clearing out the backlog of email. Maybe it's just remembering the growth of working on the thesis, but whatever the reason it ...
Ooh, that wasn't a good use of time (Distracted by the desire to listen to Brave New Waves...)
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Snaking.
I used to love listening to Brave New Waves on CBC 2 when I was writing my thesis. Tonight I tried Amarok for the first time, and as I was going through the stations I noticed that there was no CBC 2 stream.
Checking the CBC, their CBC 2 OGG stream still isn't working (it ...
Need a decent unit-testing framework for OpenGL (Unit tests are good things...)
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Snaking.
I've just moved the (rather small set of) tests in OpenGL-ctypes into a unittest test case. Discovered in doing that that the nurbs and evaluator code is working on the laptop (just doesn't show up in the real-world tests, suggesting that there's a problem in the setup there). Reinforces the idea that it's the amd64 ...
Magic of unit tests (Pinning down evaluator failure)
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Snaking.
Sat down to write a test for the evaluator code. I'd gotten it to the point where it didn't crash the program a while ago, but it was not showing up in the tests/demos. Whittled down one of the tests into a simple unittest, getting rid of textures, lighting, etceteras, but couldn't come up with ...
Okay, I'm really excited about PyCon now (List of accepted talks...)
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Snaking.
Just read through the list of accepted talks, beginning to think that I may wind up with a lot of conflicts. Normally I don't go to the talks at a conference (I hang out chatting in the halls), but there's quite a few I need to go to this time [2, 32, (51), 55, ...
Day's slippage (No work done yet of note...)
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Knight Errant.
Have made no progress all day. Obviously my mind is trying to run away from the problem, which suggests I may need to give it a few hours to percolate and work on it tomorrow morning before I start the PyOpenGL work.
Pulling the restructured code together (Refactoring core assumptions...)
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Snaking.
Focusing on real work these days. Spent most of yesterday on the restructuring of the VoIP billing system. Got all save two of the test cases for discounts working, they both exercise the same missing feature (date-matching).
I've been procrastinating all morning in the hope that it will just go away :) . Guess I ...
Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.