Author archives: Mike
Amazing what a difference having someone *like* the project makes (Trying to sleep for 5 hours now and just keep popping up to write down new ideas...)
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Snaking.
From ways to implement new features to what looks like it will be a huge improvement on memory usage and query speed... I just can't seem to stop thinking... which in a way is bad, because I'm not on the clock here. Oh well :) .
Can't really explain the major new feature (the others ...
Review goes very well (Dan seems to like it...)
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Snaking.
Started out a little rocky (Vince's IE was set such that it disallowed the SVG viewer), but Dan seemed to be very impressed with the product and its potential. I spent the time between and around the conference calls working on icons (still not happy with the one for optical nodes).
Management meeting in a ...
Think I may have discovered a serious performance flaw (Formatting ignored error message in a very tight speed-critical loop)
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Snaking.
When I raise error messages I default to being verbose, I'll tend to format the error in such a way that even if it were to show up where a user could see it, it would be somewhat intelligible (or so I tell myself).
However, the SNMP storage mechanism is doing this type of reporting ...
When you know the app is CPU and memory starved... (Don't add extremely heavy processes to the box and head out to a meeting...)
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Snaking.
Came back from the meeting to find hundreds of processes running on cmon, with complete memory exhaustion and hundreds of alert messages in my inbox. I'd decided earlier in the day to try running both the old (heavy) scanner and the demo scanner at the same time... stupid of me.
The load-levels were in the ...
Oops, forgot the pre-coffee work (Most of the day disappears in my shoddy memory)
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Snaking.
Implemented crude throttling (twice) for Cinemon during the first 7 hours of the day. The first time I implemented it based on the idea that I could take the difference in time between when I scheduled an event to occur and the time it actually occured within Twisted.
That worked... sort-of. The problem is that ...
Pleasant coffee with Shane (and Lara) (I got to hold a 7 week old scottie puppy while his owner (cute girl) got her coffee...)
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Vindaloo.
Shane suggested going out for coffee instead of him dropping in to my place, so I actually left the apartment! I need to get out far more often than I do. We spent a couple of hours hanging out in the Starbucks. Lara dropped in maybe half an hour before they closed too.The little ...
Drafting icons look like c^@9 when rendered in a full-colour environment... (I just work here...)
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Snaking.
Spent the evening working on icons for Cinemon. Unfortunately, the standardised icons are rather... ahem... dull. They look like they were intended for use on black-and-white wiring diagrams, rather than full colour interactive maps. I really feel the desire to tweak them to return to the beauty of the all-circle diagrams of the past... but ...
Catcher of last resort (First thing to be created?)
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Snaking.
Thinking, from now on, I should always code a catcher-of-last-resort first when working on a project. That is, a script that stands outside the long-running application and pings it every X seconds to make sure it's alive, and if it isn't, forces a restart.
We need to upgrade the hardware for Cinemon, particularly the RAM ...
A few OpenGLContext bug-fixes (And thus a day disappears...)
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Snaking.
Well, actually, I slept a great deal too. Fixed two longstanding bugs in OpenGLContext, one in the handling of textured-transparent geometry and the other in handling commonly malformed geometry (degenerate faces in IndexedFaceSets).
Tomorrow (after visiting grams) I'm planning on spending the day on something more VexTech-ish... probably PySNMP, maybe PyTable.
For now I'm going ...
Any little excuse to discuss philosophy (Garn I'm getting predictable in my old age...)
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Vindaloo.
Just got off the phone with Natasha. She's working on a document (while sick, no less) describing aspects of consciousness in Victorian literature. Neat thing is, it mirrors the debate about whether one can know another's consciousness save through the reports of that individual about their consciousness (and the rebuttal that even when you look ...
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.