Author archives: Mike
The Lion in Winter (I think far too much...)
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Vindaloo.
As part of my "not sitting at the computer" time today, I watched a movie (The Lion in Winter). It's a darn good movie, but the central plot development, a love needlessly abandoned that warps an entire family dropped me into one of those pensive funks.
A true love is lost for nothing, which suggests ...
Exporting to PDF should *not* take hours and multiple operating systems (Oh, and it should be real PDF, not dozens of images...)
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Tuxedo.
Okay, I decided to work on the product datasheet (one page take-away with the key information, what the product does, what its features are, and where to get more information). Have a first draft done and decide to test it. Prints out fine on Rose's HP BubbleJet (modulo the limitations of the printer itself) across ...
Inkscape just keeps impressing me (Can't say the same for Scribus, unfortunately...)
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Tuxedo.
Inkscape is rapidly turning into one of my favourite applications. Not only does it readily handle churning out standard page layouts and reading Cinemon's generated SVG, it does a very nice job of rendering out to images. I also use it for creating the templates for the generated SVG. The workflow is a little clunky, ...
Test-first giveth (Test-first taketh away...)
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Snaking.
Spent the bulk of the day testing handling of fairly rare occurences. Found a number of bugs in the new code, no big deal there. Then discovered that the same code in the original code suffers from almost the same problem. Okay, annoying. But now that I've fixed it I seem to be running into ...
That was less disruptive than I thought it would be (Hellos take all of 5 minutes and I'm back to work!)
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Vindaloo.
Rosey and friend pretty much just dropped off the luggage and then headed out to the park to let the kids run off their energy from the long day cooped up in planes and airports. I got rather a lot of work done on poster brainstorming... which wasn't actually what I was planning to do ...
The Children are Coming! The Children are Coming! (Ice-cream delays the arrival, apparently...)
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Vindaloo.
Rosey has picked up her friend and the two children already, they're off to the ice cream parlour before heading back here. Oops, actually there they are at the door now... blogus interruptus strikes...
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 ...
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.