Author archives: Mike

Went out to Woodbine beaches on Saturday. Spent the whole afternoon out in the sun and wound up lobster-red across my whole front (including my feet) and back. Walked down to Sacha's barbecue when we got home. The jeans I wore down rubbed the sunburn into a nasty glowing red patch.

Also went to Sacha's ...

Having a very productive day down at Linux Caffe. Simon, Simon and now Dan are all here working at the same table. Some Cinemon work to fix a bug, then almost the whole afternoon on invoice generation issues for the legacy billing system. I'm going to take some time now to work on the next-generation ...

No my dear Mrs. Cratchett
I cannot stay to share your meal
Though it would warm my heart
To see you at last dine as you deserve
For though you might love me tonight
You could only love the man that I've become
You rightly cursed the man I was
While those people waiting there ...

Realised around noon that I was burning up with a fever. It's gone down now (sleep is good, yogurt smoothies are better), but what with only getting 2.7 hours yesterday I'm falling way behind on billable hours this week. There are also a few tasks that just need to get finished, so I'm going to ...

One of the reasons I want to create a properly-engineered second-generation billing system is that the first-generation system I work with has a number of hacks that get around things that weren't contemplated in the initial design of various pieces.

Each of those hacks was implemented using the simplest possible design when they were discovered, ...

Finished off the day's work by working on some simple navigation widgets for the billing system. The entire system is built using directed acyclic graphs (of various types). Because of that you can readily construct generic views that let you see the parents and children of any node in the system. I'm still looking for ...

Dipping my toes in the waters of FormEncode today. Basically decided I needed a break from financial aspects, so spent some time roughing out a simple list and add view for Inventory objects (in this particular case, phone numbers/DIDs). Most of the work was:

Figuring out that All and Any values are applied in reverse ...

One of the major wish-list items for the new billing system is the ability to set up differential charging schemes using a tabular setup, so that admins can set up a default table of charges and then sets of overrides to those charges based on a rule match (e.g. you have a given token, or ...

When you run a cable company, it makes sense to have the ability to explicitly and exhaustively define the streets and street-ranges in the town so that you can never have an invalid address entered for service. I've just finished the basic implementation of that for the better billing project, along with the other major ...

Continued work on BetterBilling this evening. Particularly started working on creating stand-ins for the eventual user-driven package-setup functions. Eventually a user should be able to compose a new package (billable thing) out of technical effects (services provided by the backend) and configurations (user choices that control the operation technical effects). For now I'm just manually ...