Author archives: Mike
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Written by
on
in
Design Theory.
In other news, we went to Scotland a few weeks ago. I learned a number of things about Charles Rennie Mackintosh that were a bit surprising for me. For one thing, the thing that attracted me to his work, and I think largely contributes to his popularity is something that he was in the process ...
Cellestial Jukebox
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
StarPy Unexpectedly a Hot Topic? (Half a dozen inquiries in a week)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Weird. Have been having a huge run on number of people asking about StarPy recently. Haven't mentioned it on my blog, haven't really done anything on it in a while. Anyway, walked a paying client through the process of setting up an originate-to-custom-ivr application today. Was fun, though I've obviously forgotten a lot of my ...
Time to get off CoreBlog (Scaling issues...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Zope instance holding basically just this blog and Soni's wound up taking 7GB on disk and is unable to reliably load the blog. That's kind of ridiculous, so we're going to have to migrate to some new software. Tim has spent some time packing the DB so that we're temporarily running, but the spammers are ...
Want to use Pyglet's Generator (Time, time...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Getting finished work the Beta2 for PyOpenGL (mostly bug-fixes so far), looking through the missing pieces I thought I'd bite the bullet and set up ctypes' code generator so I could produce the WGL extension... but then realized the refactoring patch isn't in there. Browsed through the wgl module in pyglet and started thinking "why ...
Job Descriptions (What do I want to be when I grow up?)
Written by
on
in
Design Theory.
Been thinking a lot about what I want to do career-wise, but I seem to have mis-communicated it as I've been piecing it together. Mostly just a matter of changing ideas and people getting it as I think about it and try to balance it with practical questions of income and lead-times...
Here's my current ...
PyGTA Web Testing (Forum-ish with an intro to Selenium as kick-start)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
PyGTA this evening, 7pm @ Linux Caffe will be on the subject of web testing. I'll kick it off with a quick demo/overview of Selenium, then open the floor to discussions of the best patterns, anti-patterns, tools and approaches that people have found. We'll try to come up with something more concrete than "different tools ...
As You Like It (Other weekend pleasantries...)
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
Soni and I went to the Distillery District to watch "As You Like It" on Saturday. We wound up running through the rain to just barely make the show. The last time we were 7 minutes late getting to the door. It takes about 50 minutes to get there if you aren't running, and we ...
TurboGears Weirdness (Validators don't Run)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant,
Snaking.
Ran into a weird situation with TurboGears validators on a client project. It seems like they're just plain broken for the most common use case, at least one other user seems to agree. That's disturbing me primarily because it means I'm somehow "missing" the normal pattern for validator usage (people can't be using them in ...
Spammers Clobbering the Blog (Killing the server...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Zope really isn't intended for extremely write-heavy applications. With the comment spammers dumping hundreds to thousands of spams per hour on the blog now, the blog is now officially a write-heavy application.
If I've done this right, then the spams should now be moderated, so they shouldn't have any benefit for the spammers. Still, it's ...
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.