Author archives: Mike

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A Safe Place to Explore Ideas (Playfulness in design as a mechanism to allow exploration of difficult topics)


Apropos to the question of play in design, particularly the effect described in my thesis of providing a safe environment for exploring ideas:

Arlo and Janis: Can I have a kiss?

What you see here is a fairly deep topic; getting caught up in trivialities and as a result losing the chance to demonstrate affection. It's something that's painful for many people, yet ...

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Robotics of electro-active polymers for space (Scatterthought ideas on the DARPA race)


Well, as everyone and their brother has been reporting, the DARPA race across the desert wound up with best showings of 7 miles (14km or so). Lots of coverage of the mechanical exoskeleton for soldiers as well.

Of course, coverage of Spirit and Opportunity has been phenomenal Still, they're expected to drive maybe a few ...

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Little things add up (UI issues all night...)


Got an email from customer' tech asking me to review the logs and see if there was a problem on our end during a given period. So, I check, which takes an hour or so of poking around in various log tables on various running instances, and then start drafting email to say basically "no, ...

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Metaclass lovin (Clarity seems to be infusing the presentation)


So either I'm getting too deep and forgetting the audience, or the whole of the presentation is starting to make sense. Still need the section discussing how to decide when to use them, and a review of how metaclasses fit into the goals of meta-programming. It's fairly clear IMO, however, so yay. It's a much ...

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TwistedSNMP 0.2.8 release (Using something is the best way to get the kinks out...)


Getting there on the full-plant simulation front. Discovered a serious bug in the OIDStore implementations in TwistedSNMP this evening, they were storing with naive alphabetical order when the requirement is for numeric ordering. There's a new release on SourceForge.