Archives August 2004
Another small step forward for demo-kind (Sure it's a trivial environment, but it's got a certain charm...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
After visiting grams (score 3 games to 1 IIRC), spent another few hours playing with the demo "world" for OpenGLContext. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get the shadows to bake properly in OpenGLContext, but here's the current state (I'm about to switch back to work-work, so this is where it'll stay for approximately another 2 ...
What to do about a demo for OpenGLContext (Need free-to-distribute content...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
One of the things that OpenGLContext really needs is a little demo of what it can do. Unfortunately, though there was a gentleman's agreement that I could use my design work with VRTelecom for reasonable personal use, that wouldn't include dropping it into a package that hundreds of people are going to recieve.
So, I ...
PyGTA this Tuesday (Don't forget!)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Since I missed the last meeting I'm rather looking forward to this one. Peter's going to do a presentation on his robotic interface. You can find more information on the wiki. As usual, we'll try to have time for general questions and discussion of Python news.
Parsing for fun and profit (Data importers are *fun* )
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Spent the day working with SimpleParse. The easy part was defining a grammar, took maybe an hour. After that the annoying work of building the interpreter began. It was annoying because I realised that there is a fundamental flaw in my plan for this sub-project, namely, I'm not forcing the user to differentiate between objects ...
What's missing? (Loneliness strikes in the middle of the night...)
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
I'm a people junkie.
I admit that I have a problem.
I need regular conversations with intelligent individuals with wide-ranging interests to be happy. The problem is that I don't really have regular conversations with anyone any more.
This may seem strange, but the thing I miss most about being with Natasha is just having ...
Power outage as relaxation therapy (Maybe I need more excitement in my life...)
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
There have been 4 momentary blackouts this evening, where the power has gone out for only a fraction of a second. Every time it does that, the computer speakers make a rather loud noise. It so happened that when it happened, I was lying down, trying to get my shoulders and hands to relax.
Strangely, ...
Oh, I'm a continuous scanner, I am... (Continuous scanner, I am, I am)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Seem to be finished the hierarchy discovery conversion (I'm sure there's still missing parts, but it seems to work). Now I get to integrate the actual steady-state scanning code (which has been running for a month or two) with it. After that I do the loading of location data, then the archiving/statistics machinery.
All of ...
Multi-threading with PyPgSQL can be a serious PITA (Another few hours tracking down hangs due to a missing commit...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Full-featured databases tend to have low-level locking mechanisms such that if a particular thread or client has modified a row in one transaction, then attempts to reference that row in other transactions are blocked. When your database interface (e.g. PyPgSQL) doesn't allow for sharing transactions between threads, you can (when a problem occurs) wind up ...
Rather annoying cutting old code (New scanner code added to old cloth makes some poor seams...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
When you wind up back-modifying large-ish bodies of code to work in entirely new ways, you wind up with a lot of areas where the fit isn't wonderful. In this case, the ping scanner was written with the assumption that the entire hierarchy was coming from database, and so therefor every operation could rely on ...
Why do we still have software patents? (Have they helped foster invention? No. Then why grant them?)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Just seems insane to me that people can get patents on what are essentially just ideas. It should not be possible to patent "using a computer + network to do x", yet that's what's being done. It should not be possible to patent basic mathematics or algorithms, yet we allow it. And every time we ...
Daily archives
- Aug. 6, 2004
- Aug. 8, 2004
- Aug. 10, 2004
- Aug. 12, 2004
- Aug. 13, 2004
- Aug. 14, 2004
- Aug. 16, 2004
- Aug. 17, 2004
- Aug. 19, 2004
- Aug. 20, 2004
- Aug. 22, 2004
- Aug. 23, 2004
- Aug. 24, 2004
- Aug. 26, 2004
- Aug. 28, 2004
- Aug. 31, 2004
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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.