Author archives: Mike

I really do love Toronto.  I've never been anywhere else that has such a riot of cultures all flowing (relatively) smoothly along beside each other.  Faces on the subway are so varied that it seems like a United Nations meeting.  There's every type of restaurant you can imagine and quite a few you wouldn't have ...

Today was the first time I connected a projector to the new laptop.  Good news: worked reasonably well, though we couldn't find the option to tell the laptop to display different values on the projector and the screen.

Bad news: something has changed in the settings such that the laptop can no longer recover from ...

Looks like two of my talk proposals for PyCon have been accepted.  One is an intermediate/advanced talk porting your code to OpenGL 3.x, the other an introductory presentation on Profiling/optimization.  Should be fun :) .

Back when I was doing the next-generation (now many generations old) Multi-User Technology (MUTech) for Holodesk I thought it was really cool that there was no "server", it was all just peers where any given object could be hosted on any machine, and the system would let you set up (potentially one-way) proxies on any ...

Here are my rough notes from PyGTA's programming mantra's discussion this evening:

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
   Have a vision before you start coding.
   Know your task.
   Know your client.
   Ignore the impossibility behind the curtain.
Your clients don't know what they want.
   Charge by the hour.
   Play around with ...

Ran into this problem on Friday at a client site and just couldn't find a Python library that did everything I needed wrt providing login to TurboGears and properly uploading a file to a controller in the TurboGears application.  Bothered me that there was no easy way to do this (seems like it should be ...

Was looking into mitigating some of the slowdown from the recent fix, mainly be rewriting this little function:

@classmethod
def from_param( cls, instance, typeCode=None ):
    try:
        pointer = cls.dataPointer( instance )
    except TypeError, err:
        array = cls.asArray( instance, typeCode )
        pp = ctypes.c_void_p( cls.dataPointer( array ) )
        pp._temporary_array_ = (array,)
        return pp
    else:
        return ctypes.c_void_p( ...

Having to work with svn again at a client site... I miss bzr.  Even bzr-rebase is turning up fondly in my memories.  It's really just the merging... merging with svn seems to always be an "Oh good Lord! We have to MERGE!" event, filled with conflicts and crashes halfway through switching that leave 1/2 of ...

Installed kvm on the laptop.  Was a bit annoyed to discover I had to reboot (to alter the BIOS in order to enable the virtualization support in the processors), but other than that was extremely easy to install (just aptitude install kvm (I already had QEMU)).

Compared to vanilla QEMU on the same box the ...

When you code, do you consciously think about the principles in the Zen of Python? Do you find yourself following them automatically without thought? Do you find they are pointless/irrelevant to your coding? Do you ever defend your decisions (to yourself or others) by reference? What about other programming "rules" (formal patterns, XP principles)? Do ...