Author archives: Mike
Diamonds or Coal-fires
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
If I write a thousand verses
Will I find a hundred gold
Or will the writing of the thousand
Turn the whole to rotten steel
Would I rather write in diamonds
Crystals pressed from darkest smoke
Or write mountains of dark coal
And wait for pressure from below
Oh the diamonds can be clever
Melting ...
Crouching Teddy
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
He lies in wait
Lovable teddy bear
Searching for victims
To share his unfettered joy
Scanning the crowds
Gift baskets brimming
For some cute vegetarian
Whose heart is pure
Sipping his latte
Of frothy soy
Panther Kitty
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
Panther kitty I want to play
Bat words between our paws
Tease them into tangled strings
Yarns to knit new stories
Beats to play new songs
Yet the audience is there
So we must leave off our play
Others share the stage this day
Eleven Short Words
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
Kindly friend's mother
Touched by three lines
Of eleven short words
Working around Firefox 1.5's SVG target problems (Sure it's simple, but it takes hours to try all the other hacks...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Cinemon, as some of you may know, uses SVG graphics as one of its core navigational mechanisms. Until today we've basically had to have users use either the Adobe SVG viewer or be annoyed by the Mozilla browsers loading the whole site into the iframe where the navigation graphic is displayed. This is because Mozilla ...
Bit of maintenance among the learning tasks... (Or, what I did for the last few days...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
I'm continuing to work on making StarPy a decent platform for writing Asterisk applications. In between I'm working on Cinemon administration (and a bit of code) and little bits of the VoIP project that need handling.
Wound up installing FreeBSD, the HotSpot software and Cinemon on a box for one of our partners. Ran into ...
Funky GSM playback with Asterisk 1.2.1 (Load issues, maybe...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking,
Tuxedo.
I upgraded my Asterisk development machine to 1.2.1 a few days ago (from 1.0.something). Since then I've had really poor playback of the GSM sound files (slowed down dramatically, often dropping out) even to SIP phones connected across a local LAN. Connection and link to remote machines produces fine quality, so I'm assuming it's a ...
Stones of the Present Church
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
She examined fifty years
From that first boat ride
To the rough cut stones
Of the present church
Wished for more time with him
She'd had more than most
Yet still she cried
She'd Retract It
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
So she'll no longer tell us
In her so-circumspect new verse
Of men hard within
Rubbing up against her skin
She'd retract the words
Pretend we'd never heard
Yet what harm if she's bedded
Those mortal yet god-headed
Who are we to judge it fall
When Zeus or 'pollo comes to call
Upon a gentle ...
Admonition to the Hyades
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
Be gentle, gentle raining daughters
There's no man born worth
Tears so hot or sharp with pain
Their hearts are hard things
Rocks set against the seas
Not worthy of such devotion
Not capable of proper love
Forget then your wailing
Stop the rain from falling
To drench the o'er watered earth
Let your storms ...
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.