Author archives: Mike

So today something like 2.5 or 3 hours was spent on the SIP demo (specifically getting it installed on a laptop, and then figuring out why that didn't work). Problem is, while the demo itself is a simple set of executables with its support files all zipped up in a nice package, it still requires ...

Seems as though VoIP is becoming a hot topic. I should probably sit down for a week and master Shtoom so that we could offer custom VoIP work using it. Dave seems very up on the codebase, and my review of it for the SIP pager project certainly seemed to suggest that it's worth investigation ...

Bryan noted at dinner this evening that my blog makes him feel sorry (for himself, not me). I think the depression actually comes from sitting in a room all day staring at a computer. Computers are evil I tells ya! EEEEVVVIIIILLL! It just happens that my blog is on the computer when the depression hits. ...

The root of the problem, of course, is discounting the time spent on learning, the time spent working through problems with libraries, etceteras. The "debugging is free" stuff is probably not a great idea either.

When I look at it over the last week-and-a-half, I've spent more than 60 hours on various aspects of the ...

[As all the avid readers know, I've been trying to listen to various lecture series while working in order to keep myself from going batty with lack of intellectual variety.]

I just finished the Science Fiction lecture series... and was rather disappointed with it compared to the philosophy series. Probably the greatest disappointment was that, ...

I seem to have worked around the big nasty evil database bug. And how, you may ask? By adding a completely extraneous commit into the middle of the hierarchy parsing code. ARGH. There's no reason for it to help, there's no way it should change anything. It's just some silly locking artefact where a SELECT ...

Bryan and one of his peoples are experiencing what appears to be the "big nasty evil database bug" (formerly the "evil database bug") where the database (b)locks in the middle of a hierarchy import (which is the only database operation that's occuring).

This has a lot of secondary effects, as once the database thread is ...

Instead of going to bed I wound up creating a use-case sample for boundaries. This is actually one of the tasks Tim was wanting to accomplish. I don't actually have the huge regex he was using to do the "is it the correct format" check, so I cobbled one together for demonstration purposes.

I've linked ...

Wound up doing a code review (I know, not really pair programming) for D'Arcy and then some actual pair programming with Tim this evening. Tim was trying to use BasicProperty's data-value checking for doing web-form validation and was rather frustrated with it.

No reason it couldn't work, it's just that the generality of BasicProperty would ...

Went to a friend's birthday party this evening. Other than those I already knew, just about everyone was "highly successful", (particularly lots of lawyers and a doctor or two). Thing is, I didn't connect with any of them. That is, in the entire evening I didn't have a single conversation about anything interesting (with someone ...