Author archives: Mike

We have a line-of-last-defense script that monitors a Cinemon server for failures/performance problems and kills/restarts the server if problems are detected. It's been running perfectly well for months upon months on multiple machines, but somehow it's started leaking memory on one (production-but-running-CVS-head) machine.

It's a ridiculously simple script (intentionally). It just retrieves a page using ...

I weary of being your monster
Force outside your normal world
Of white-washed fences and lies
Untamed thing beyond the barrier
Unwanted intruder in the dark

I want to be able to access work email from Rose's laptop, but at the moment I'm using Thunderbird with mbox files on my desktop. So, I've now installed an IMAP server on the desktop and am in the process of moving the work email over to using it. I'll have to ssh tunnel into ...

My headache seems to have abated with switching projects and drinking two large glasses of strong green tea (about a litre). Of course now I'm so wired I haven't a chance in heck of sleeping for a few hours. Think I'm going to try to get some more work done on the VoIP project. Hopefully ...

Since Tim asked whether I believe philosophy is a linear march of ideas maybe some of you will get a kick out of this obviously over-linearised set of notes (linked below) for tomorrow's talk at the Toronto Western Philosophy Club. The linearity is mostly a side-effect of planning a talk, no need to shout ...

Having one of those headache-inducing days. Adding "unlisted number" features to the VoIP billing system. It's a common situation in accounting software; an event occurs at some unknown time (exporting the values for the telephone book), at some other (known) time, the user may change whether they want the feature or not for "a month", ...

I've now implemented a fairly nice feature (read it costs you $10,000 as a stand-alone product from other companies) for Cinemon, namely being able to see the last 14 days of graphed upstream channel signal-quality and transfer history (about 10,000 data-points per channel per property with 5 properties). We've had limited (one or two day) ...

A dog beaten many times
Cringes away from the hand
Outstretched to give it love
Much worse when my mind
Knows there is no danger
Yet still I cringe
Away from the touch
Of those who love me most

Did some more work on profiling. Tried specialising each version of the wrapper call method. It's ever so slightly faster, but it's still ~60% overhead above the calls it makes.

Then borrowed Rosey's laptop to work on the Win32 port. A few of the functions are working, but basically anything that uses an array is ...

I want demanding passion
Nights of screaming whispers
The press of urgent lips
Exploring ideas not yet born
Jumping from science to art
In an ecstasy of love
Debating fine points of Descartes
In a blanket under the stars
To feel the soft nape of the neck
Beneath my too-grizzled chin
I want to fall ...