Author archives: Mike
Ach! It grates! (It's been done so many times before...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Today was spent getting the feature-display and selection mechanisms written. The annoying part is that it's all been done so many times before it's depressing to think that I'm writing it myself. Oh well.
Not much else going on, got up, worked, took a short nap, worked more, now need to get to sleep. As ...
Impedence mismatch leads to LCD (Or, my day in business-logic programming...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Today was spent on database design for the sip front-end project. All in all fairly productive, we've got the whole thing nicely isolated so that it only needs two references to outside schema. It's fairly straightforward as a design, and shouldn't cause any problems (so expect to hear about lots of frustration and heartache ;) ...
Building observability into BasicProperty (Well, adding a module that provides it, anyway...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Couldn't sleep, so decided to enhance a demo I wrote a few days ago when someone asked about how to do observable fields/properties in Python. OpenGLContext's VRML97 scenegraph is built out of observable fields, and we have a number of observable BasicProperty sub-classes in Cinemon, but BasicProperty itself hasn't had a "standard" observability story.
Backing ...
Far too long a day (Working with foreign systems is a PITA)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Couldn't get much of Tim or D'Arcy's time today, so much of my time was spent in frustration. I've noticed as I get older that I scream more at the computer.
Eventually I had to admit defeat and decide to wait until someone who knows the system explains what the freakin heck I need to ...
Blood on a Bathroom Wall
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
I go farther
Knowing nothing
Can bring me back
My petard, it is exploding! (glutInit failure was due to an auto-generated wrapper)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
Finally got the glutInit function working (and, in fact, enough of GLUT to do a "hello world" with it). I even went to the extreme of adding a test case to ctypes that deals with a similarly structured argument set. The problem, it turned out, was that I was using the auto-generated wrapper, which had ...
The joy of infinite rebuilding
Written by
on
in
Snaking,
Tuxedo.
Well, not the most productive of evenings. Hung the computer a couple of times trying to get K3B to work. Discovered a dependency was needing rebuilding (revdep-rebuild), so rebuilt that, am now trying to build KDE, just to see if that was the problem on that front, so haven't tested to see if K3B is ...
Lazy bum! (Get typing already...)
Written by
on
in
Vindaloo.
For some reason my hands have been a mess since yesterday afternoon. Not sure if it's just stress from work, or just plain too much typing, but the little fire beetles they are a crawling. Probably should have gone out and done some exercise of some form today, but instead just lay in bed trying ...
To work on side-projects (Or to sleep...)
Written by
on
in
Snaking.
It's been a long week. What I feel like doing is getting together with someone and chatting for a few hours, then dropping off to sleep. Just dropping off to sleep is pretty tempting too. Ah sleep, that glorious absence of reading and typing...
Brutalism in Design (Conversation in a cafe)
Written by
on
in
Design Theory.
Okay, I'll try to do a better job of describing brutalism here than I did earlier when Simon asked me about it.
Brutalism comes from the general idea of alternative beauty. That is, it proposes that there can be beauty in that which is not refined or "finished". It proposes that the traces of creation ...
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.