Author archives: Mike

So, one of the goals for this stage of development is to provide higher-level overviews of the data, including graphical views. After spending a few hours looking at the various C-library charting solutions, I'm beginning to favour just creating the graphics as SVG vector images using a very lightweight library called SVGdraw. That will ...

Everything in the universe is moving at light speed. Normally we move primarily through a temporal dimension, rather than a physical dimension. When we exert energy to move in space we can make the vector veer off from the temporal dimension, but we can't make it go faster than light-speed no matter how hard we ...

Here, for instance, is a radical (but not particularly new) idea in computer language design:

The computer records all interactions with the programmer and shares it's understandings of meanings and implications of any given set of events/contexts with all other computers in the system.

With every spare bit of processing and communications power, the computer ...

Okay, I can't get to sleep, and since I'm lying here thinking about wish lists, I may as well sit down and create the first published "Mikey's Wish List".  For those who haven't been following along, a wish list in this context describes the set of attributes which we would like in a lover, ...

Going to spend tomorrow gardening @ Shiva's place, so no open-source work done this weekend. Rosey's working all afternoon, so she won't get to see the new place. Mom phoned to suggest a few plants this evening. Suppose I should go shopping before I leave so I will have some actual food in the house ...

So today's primary development requirement was to compile the group history into a readily-used form for doing back-history tracking. Unfortunately, Roger's cable seems to be having some difficulties, and local PostgreSQL refuses to load the database dump from the live system. Major PITA.

So, network's back up now, but I'm tired and have to get ...

So, obviously The Daily Show with John Stewart is one of the more popular shows among the liberal-leaning well-educated minority. Most of my friends watch it. Many of the people at UU watch it. Same with PyGTA. Strange thing is, it creates these weird conversations where everyone in the conversation knows what is being discussed.

Little book on superstring theory. XXX recommended it at the last dinner party. I checked it out about two weeks ago. Finally sat down for a few minutes this afternoon to start reading it and realised that I really want to read this thing! Now I just need to find the time in the next ...

Sure, it's only 1/2 over, but so far it looks like this day is mostly just little bookkeeping fixes, interface tweaks, cleaning up after introducing stricter semantics for ESN fields, that kind of thing. Still no word from the customer, so still no idea if this approach is worthwhile for the UI or not. Hopefully ...

Network connection has been down for a couple of hours here. Which is frustrating mostly because, although I should be able to work without it on just my dev machine, I'm trigger-shy about download a recent database snapshot to the machine (last time I wound up with a corrupted Windows (the disk is still flaky)). ...