Author archives: Mike
Oh, a note on Bruce Trail Club etiquette (The activities page doesn't really make this clear)
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Vindaloo.
Apparently the only time you should be calling a bus-hike group organiser is if there's a problem/question, or if the outing is marked as a pre-registration type in the book. They apparently have more than enough people to fill a bus for all of the bus trips, so they really don't want to hear from ...
One of those things about which I should probably be excited (Tuple spaces... why?)
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Snaking.
Okay, what am I missing about tuple spaces? It seems to be a fairly basic data-sharing protocol which requires a server process somewhere. I mean, that's nice, but what are the advantages of this particular system over an RPC or formal message-passing/routing system.
If you're going to do all your networking using a (relatively ...
Life of Mikey (Trivialities and planning...)
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Vindaloo.
So, I'm up fairly early (despite not being able to sleep at all last night) with the intention of; getting in 3/4 of a day's work before 6pm, going to Aaron's show this evening (I'm actually RSVP'd for a Barbeque @ the neighbours, but Aaron's showing is a one-time thing IIUC), hitting the hay ASAP ...
The Conversion of Shane (Red Alert II enthusiasts are born...)
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Vindaloo.
Yesterday marked Shane's introduction to the Real Time Strategy (RTS) game genre. Mark, Dave and I have been playing Red Alert II for quite some time, and Praveen and Vivek had previous RTS experience (I think), but Shane has been a First Person Shooter (FPS), particularly a Quake III, devoté and has previously rejected our ...
Fitting in with people who have normal schedules is a pain (Who ever heard of "call before 9pm"?)
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Vindaloo.
So, once again, I managed to miss the window of opportunity for calling the chap who's running the hike. I considered calling at 18:19, but thought he'd likely be eating dinner, so I put the hiking schedule down in front of my workstation and promptly forgot it until 21:15.
Won't be able to call tomorrow ...
More pointless details on Rosey's new machine (Just 'cause I'm waiting for it...)
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Vindaloo.
Pulled the old 60GB drive and the original 256MB RAM module out of my workstation to put in Rosey's machine instead of her current drive. Accidentally tried one of the 512MB modules and discovered that they don't work with the older motherboard in the PIII machine.
Eventually the PIII will be the mail and file ...
Slogs on toast (Perched on the edge of the sublime...)
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Snaking.
Beyond UI cleanups and tracking down (or rather trying to track down) some bugs exposed during monkey-testing, I've been seriously pondering how to handle what amounts to a huge change in approach to the app without disturbing it too much just before the demo next week. Thing is, I would really like this approach to ...
Rosey's moved in (Her computer is a mess...)
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Vindaloo.
Found 3 trojans/virii so far in scanning the machine, and the thing is dog slow for just about every operation. Going to have to wipe it and rebuild it from scratch once I finish backing up the data. It's an Win2K box that's been sitting unprotected on the network (though behind a slow connection) for ...
Why minority parties want proportional representation (For those who are curious)
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Vindaloo.
The Greens do appear to have more than enough support for funding in the next election (4%). To put that into perspective, that's something like 12 seats worth of the popular vote, but not a single actual seat obtained.
| Party |
% of Seats |
% of Vote |
|---|---|---|
| Liberal |
44% |
37% |
| Conservative |
32% |
30% |
| Bloq ... |
For those too lazy to read Canadian newspapers (Liberals are back in power, but with a minority government...)
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Vindaloo.
Looks like Canada will be governed by an unofficial coalition of left-leaning parties, with the Liberals (centre-left) and NDP (left, but lately deeply into crack) making up the most commonly aligned voting blocks (though the Bloq Quebequois is quite similar to the NDP in many ways (save that they want to split Quebec out 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.