Author archives: Mike

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

We're heading to a lecture tomorrow about a new treatment for cancer involving preventing the growth of blood vessels via a suppressive drug. Dad's coming into town to attend, so hopefully we'll get some time to hang around and chat afterwards.

Have had high-priority issues show up half-way through two days in a row now, pulling me from one client to another. Result has been 11+ hours billable each day (on top of not being particularly rested from the weekend). I'm getting well toward mind-numbed.

Some (tired) thoughts:

Pre and post condition checks are good things ...

Just got the good news, my cute little sister has just passed her entrance exam for French as a Second Language (for elementary school teachers). This means she can take the whole suite of FSL courses required to become a full-fledged French teacher in Canadian schools. She's been working on her French for a couple ...

Wound up working most of the weekend, which was a bad thing, because I really needed to have a few days of down time. Oh well. Got some work done for a client, but not all that needed to get done. Spent 3 or 4 hours reviewing TurboGears and SQLAlchemy for another client project. Should ...

Spent the whole day on C++ memory-leak hunting. C++ really is a tool that no-one should use without some mechanism to take away the memory management. Without automated handling it's just way too easy to lose track of a reference and wind up with a couple of hundred KB lost.

Got some book-keeping stuff taken ...

We did 3.5 days of sprinting at PyCon with ~12 people (the GASP folks were sort-of part of our sprint, as they are targeting the laptop, and we worked with them). Mostly we worked on games, with Tony leading a smaller group working on accessibility tools.

We had most people (basically all those using Win32 ...

Good (and long) day today. Phil and I worked through his porting of the Watermelon game to the XO, with Phil documenting what he was doing and my trying to answer his questions. It exposed a large number of issues that I've become to familiar with to recognize any more. Mel is going to read ...