Archives May 2005
Wikipedia editing is addictive too! (Try to create a simple link from a blog post and wind up writing another encyclopedia article...)
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Design Theory.
While I was writing that last blog post I wanted to link to Wikipedia entries for van der Laan, proportional systems, and a number of other things... but there's no page for proportion (architecture), so I have to create one... and then I have to go through my thesis notes looking for the various ...
On Limiting Languages (Old images from my thesis prompt a post...)
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Design Theory.
I happened upon a description of the Plastic Number as I was noodling about doing system backups and the like. For those not familiar with it, the Plastic Number is a proportional system developed by a Dutch monk which was based on experiments to determine perceptually what we are able to distinguish and compare.
van ...
Ah the glory of web-site design (IE sucks the lichen off the rocks...)
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Snaking.
Day was spent on posters and web-sites and similar things. I'm still thinking that taking that extra day from last week as a flex day would be useful. Do some shopping and laundry before our guests arrive (3 extra people, (two children), in a 2 bedroom apartment for 1 or 2 months... going to be ...
I'm really rusty! (Web-site design doesn't go spectacularly well...)
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Snaking.
I couldn't sleep this evening, so I did a bit of work setting up the Cinemon website. The design is quite crude at the moment. I'd intended to have the splash-screen background be 3 images, similar to the poster, but then I realised I'd have to muck about more to do that, so I ...
A better class of nightmare (Simple, direct, with inventions bonus...)
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Vindaloo.
Apparently the movie last night really affected me. Night was peppered with dreams of fighting to be respected, fighting to survive, etceteras. Of the inventions I can remember, one was a monitor for store shelves that simply records when someone breaks the plane, the other is an old invention that was getting field-tested (well, used) ...
Why am I home on a Saturday night? (This is just pitiful...)
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Vindaloo.
I keep thinking I'll sit down to work on PyOpenGL and having waves of ennui (can ennui form a wave? more of a sluggish oil-slicked wash than a wave, I guess...) wash away the desire. So, I watched "Always Outnumbered", which was perfect, because I've recently been getting a bad string of movies where they ...
Wow, a whole day on graphics (I'm so out of practice...)
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Design Theory.
One of the interesting things about design is that theory tends to be too slow as a mechanism for accomplishing it in the real world. While you could work everything out from first principles every time you wanted to place a piece of text on a sheet of paper, you'd get out-competed by the guy ...
Run Snake Run (A Python hotshot profile loading/display GUI)
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Snaking.
Well, as mentioned earlier (yesterday), it takes far too long to load the HotShot profiler dumps. So, I wrote my own little loader/viewer package. It processes about 70,000 records/second, which lets it load a profile fairly quickly, but it's not blazingly fast by any means.
What makes it useful/cool is that it loads the dump ...
Profile first, then optimise (Surprising what you find with actual measurements...)
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Snaking.
Biggest event of the day was discovering that 30% of total work in the system was being done in a __cmp__ method that was doing the equivalent of "if x is y" when everything was said and done. It appears, in the end, to have been the ultimate source of the slowdowns that I've spent ...
Wasn't I supposed to stop working back then (Look ma, hour-per-day discipline falling apart...)
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Snaking.
Wanted to add some debugging code to see if I could catch some bugs during the evening's operation... turned into rather a lot of bug-fixing and minor feature implementation work that bring's the day's total to some entirely improper number of hours (sorry hands). I have to stop now or I won't be able to ...
Daily archives
- May 2, 2005
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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.