Author archives: Mike
Depth and Frustration (Or my day in rewrites...)
Written by
on
in
Design Theory.
Spent the whole day on the section(s) on Depth and Familiarity. Eventually realised that there should be two sections. The one on Depth and Frustration introduces the ideas from Venturi and their (mis)application, then the one on Depth and Familiarity explaining the "class split" in design. Anyway, enough caveats, here's the first section (the second ...
On Snowy Streets
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
On quiet snowy streets
A friend and I walk home
Trading the minor news of our lives
Since last we sat and talked
Leaving him I wonder
Why my life so seldom
Brings friends together
On snowy streets
The Last Man
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
It strikes me that
Though they may protest
Were we truly the last men
Alive upon the earth
We might not seem
Quite so horrible
And I imagine
They might perhaps
Reconsider that oath
But culling so hard
Seems a drastic path
I may be wrong
But perhaps
It goes too far
Just to get ...
My Eye Catches
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
I think
Too much
My eye
Catches
On things
Not worthy
I stare
At nothing
As thoughts
Cascade
Into silent
Dark pools
Of reflection
Very long day with 0 billables (And way too much caffeine)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Management meeting, then a quick trip to the library, then a crash due to the unreasonably early hour I had to get up at for the meeting, then the UU meeting, then coffee/drinks after the meeting with Bryan and co. I'm now tense and jittery from the caffeine, but my eyes aren't able to focus ...
Oh, while I'm thinking of it (IRC client for phones...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Was thinking earlier that one of those "cool, but useless" projects might be to use StarPy and Festival to read live IRC feeds to a user. Twisted has all sorts of fun little protocols it can access, but IRC is just so magnificently geeky that it would obviously gather thousands of users in minutes.
Oh, ...
StarPy grows rudimentary hierarchic IVR menus (UI toolkit for voice?)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Okay, there's a new release of StarPy up. This adds menu support with the commonly desirable operations (e.g. options to go up a level, repeating the prompt a limited number of times if the user doesn't respond, that kind of thing). The same API also provides a basic enter-digits handler, though I'll need to produce ...
Peter Pan Fathers
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
Cerebral late bloomers
These Peter Pan fathers
Children without childhoods
Should come with warnings
Lest emotional women
Take them improperly
And hurt themselves
How did I forget that (Sunday night's not great for thinking, apparently...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Didn't even touch the VoIP stuff (yet) today (though did have a short phone call or two about it). I had forgotten on Sunday that I was going to phone a distributor Monday morning. Basically spent the whole day on the phone call, research to answer some questions (yes, Cinemon should be 100% Euro-DOCSIS compatible ...
Interesting, but not particularly productive (Playing with log-files...)
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
I've been somewhat frustrated with the webalizer output I've been using to review my site. It only shows the top 30 or so pages on the site, includes the search-engine's crawling in the data-set, and doesn't provide any sort of information about what things are linked together, what people are looking for, that kind of ...
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.