Author archives: Mike
What am I missing? (Things to look into on Saturday)
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Snaking.
I'm still seeing failures in OpenGL-ctypes in the nurbs and evaluator calls. I've traced through them, compared them to C versions of the code and have basically run out of reasons for it to fail. What I'm left with is the possibility that I've started tickling a ctypes-on-amd64 error or that I'm doing something monumentally ...
Finally get workstation up to date (DLL hell resolved)
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Tuxedo.
My workstation has been stuck in a quasi-working state for a long time now (a month?). Basically I updated to Python 2.5, then tried to update to Eric4 since Eric3's dependencies wouldn't build on Python 2.5. The Eric4 thing never worked, so I removed it. A little later when KDE 3.5.5 was marked stable on ...
Got OpenGLContext 3D text rendering working with numpy (Finally sit down to fix my FontTools fixes...)
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Snaking.
I did some patches months and months ago to make FontTools use numpy to extract font data (outlines and metrics) from TTF font files. However, I messed something up in the patch. The system would render characters, but they seemed to be random characters and they were way too widely spaced.
Yesterday when I sat ...
Apparently ctypes is more interesting than OpenGL (Anti-cool-graphics movement makes its presence felt ;) )
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Snaking.
My proposal for a talk at PyCon got accepted, but almost every comment was of the form "Oh, I guess so, but we'd rather just hear about ctypes". So I suppose I'll re-think the talk to just be about ctypes and ignore the whole OpenGL thing. My proposal was more along the lines of "when ...
I would have thought this was "normal care" (Hiring and paying someone to do the book-keeping is not enough)
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Knight Errant.
Apparently (so I am told), hiring someone to do the book-keeping for a company is not sufficient care in making sure the books are kept properly. Just seeing that witholdings are showing up on pay slips and assuming they are being remitted is not enough. Instead, the director is expected to track down and be ...
A tip for owners of small businesses (If your bookkeeper is unwilling to show you the books, change bookkeepers...)
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Knight Errant.
Learning a rather hard lesson these days. Just because you're paying someone to do a job and they claim to be doing it doesn't mean they really are doing it. When the person is supposed to be doing tax-related work, having them not get their job done can do more than just scuttle the company. ...
Dad has a blog (Green Party discussions)
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Vindaloo.
Dad came into town today to help Pearl with some paperwork. We got to have dinner with him. Gods it's good to talk with him, sometimes I forget just how important his thoughts are. He's now sharing them on his blog.
Mostly we discussed the predicted ocean acidification effects. This is basically a ...
Not much OpenGL hacking this weekend (But I got some general maintenance done and played a couple of games)
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Knight Errant,
Snaking,
Vindaloo.
I spent much of the weekend trying to decompress from the week and finish recovering from the cold. I got a tiny bit of OpenGL work done, basically getting OpenGL extensions fixed for Win32. No big deal, after all, who uses Windows these days. Still, nice to have it fixed.
Also got the accounting for ...
Falling behind can make you fall behind (When projects slip past hard deadlines...)
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Knight Errant.
I've been undertaking a rather enormous restructuring of the VoIP billing system for a past few weeks. It's pretty close to finished, but it's not yet ready for prime time. Problem is, today is the first of the month, so the invoices must go out.
So, I've spent the last few days (when I wasn't ...
I sort-of forgot that Asterisk programming could be fun (StarPy reminders...)
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Snaking.
Have a (short) contract starting tomorrow to do some StarPy programming. Figured I'd get back in the swing of things by implementing a quick-and-dirty Call-to-Call application.
Basically this is a little AGI + AMI application that you have running on an Asterisk box that registers for a phone number. When a call comes in, the ...
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.