Author archives: Mike
Further through proportion (Alberti to the fall of proportion...)
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Design Theory.
Doing a bit more reading after work. Basically moving through the Renaissance up to the Baroque. I'm going to have to go back and do some analysis of the various proportional schemes. Wish I had a decent 3D modeller (i.e. one that worked like 3DSMax or AutoCAD), I'd like to produce something similar to the ...
Lonely dreams
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Vindaloo.
Dark
Lonely dreams
Haunt
This
Too large
Bed
Little bits and pieces all day (Cleaning up after construction...)
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Snaking.
Spent the day on Cinemon cleanup and tightening. Nothing dramatic, just little ducts and wires poking through the finish that needed to be poked back in behind the plaster.
I finished the TAL-to-Nevow conversion for the modems page, then made a Content adapter that allows the Content page-fragments to be rendered directly as though they ...
First day of the new schedule (Makes for a very long day, even with a pleasant dinner...)
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Snaking.
I'm trying out a new work schedule this week. Basically I'm working an extra 2 (billable) hours/day and taking both Friday and Saturday to work on the thesis. There's not much else to say about the day, most of it was project management, testing, and minor tweaks/fixes. The last 3.5 hours was taking in an ...
Oh, right, PyOpenGL (I did a few minutes of that this afternoon)
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Snaking.
I fixed the longstanding bug in PyOpenGL where it fails when used with py2exe because of Tarn's "version" file. PyOpenGL's C configuration code uses that file and I've always broken something or other when I change it, so I now just read it and create a version.py file that is imported at runtime.
Generating and Limiting Orders (A quicky thought before I toddle off to bed...)
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Design Theory.
As avid readers of the Design Theory portion of the blog will be aware, yesterday I mentioned Padovan's note regarding the ideological focus of Van der Laan versus Corbusier (Empathic vs. Abstract) and the underlying idea that the two approaches to order are based on the need to bring meaning to the world. In other ...
Proportion: Science, Philosophy, Architecture ((reading a book by) Richard Padovan)
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Design Theory.
I spent the afternoon in the wonderful world of architectural epistomology. Padovan is the author of the book "Dom Hans van der Laan, Modern Primitive" which was the best presentation of the ideas of van der Laan I came across while writing my thesis. I hesitated to pick up "Proportion" because I mistakenly thought I ...
Guess I should buy a Research Reader's card ($150/year for a library card seems high...)
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Vindaloo.
As I was playing over at Wikipedia I realised (again) that I have no primary source access any more (since leaving university). I really do want access to architectural theorists works. I just don't know that I'll have $150/year worth of books I need that I can't trek down to the Toronto Public Research Library ...
Numpy goes nuts? (Weird error shows up deep inside OpenGLContext...)
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Snaking.
This error popped up about a week ago, but it showed up just as I was finishing work on OpenGL-ctypes, so I never looked into it. This evening it's back in full swing, rendering basically all of OpenGLContext useless. It's showing up with the Numpy 23.7 release (Gentoo stable), and seems to be an obvious ...
Convenience during development (Forgotten during release...)
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Snaking.
So it appears that the recent spate of failures to build PyOpenGL are all basically the same problem. As I was developing PyOpenGL 2.0.2 I removed a check that was looking for an explicit version of SWIG (1.3.13), as I was moving to SWIG 1.3.23. I didn't spend the 10 seconds or so it would ...
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.