Author archives: Mike
Why isn't the mozsvg project a plugin? (Would seem like the right way to go, no?)
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Snaking.
I've been testing my changes since switching back to Linux by using Firefox. That's fine, but there's no AMD64-compatible SVG plug-in that I'm aware of for Firefox. There's also no flag for building MozSVG into Firefox that I can find, so, it's off to Mozilla (the suite). Problem there is that it has started taking ...
Setup work for Jelle's project (Install/port radiance to AMD64 Gentoo...)
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Design Theory,
Snaking.
Jelle's project is scripting Radiance, so I need to install it. So far it's not marked as working on AMD64 in Gentoo portage. Hopefully it will just build and run :) . My eyes are not in great shape (kinda blurring as I try to read the screen), so I'm trying to avoid doing anything ...
Thunderbird for those of us with enough eye strain (Editing a configuration file in the application data directory is something no grandmother should have to do...)
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Vindaloo.
Thunderbird on Windows always seems to pick up a good default font size for the message-list and tree panes. On Linux it picks some god-awful small font that, after a few hours, starts to make my eyes ache (and when one's sister is just getting over an eye infection, bloodshot, watery eyes tend to make ...
Long day's hacking (Not much to show...)
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Snaking.
I try to at least make everything modestly testable, but sometimes it just seems to bog down the day's work...
I've got this fairly simple requirement; rescan unresolved records in the CMTS tables every minute or two to determine whether the modem has come back online. That was pretty easy to write. The problem is ...
TV-on-Linux almost working... (Or so I tell myself)
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Snaking.
Okay, decided to spend my jittery hours seeing about getting those last few items keeping me off of linux taken care of. Item number one; Personal Video Recorder. As regular readers may remember, I've given up on MythTV and am concentrating on FreeVO (mostly because, as it's written in Python, I might have a chance ...
Beautiful waitresses are always trying to get me to overdose on caffeine (Unfortunately, I always seem to fall for their tricks...)
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Snaking.
PyGTA meeting was this evening. Greg Wilson gave a talk about his course at the University of Toronto and about his attempts to make Python more acceptable to the academic community (for which he got a PSF grant for this year).
Was interesting to hear his perspective, and I agree with the general principle that ...
My punishment for continuing to run Windows (And buying a cheap consumer router/firewall...)
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Snaking.
Woke up this morning to AVG flashing messages telling me that multiple files in the system32 folder were infected (and that it didn't know how to fix them). Fixed that (eventually) by deleting the DLLs and then manually unpacking them from their source CDs, AVG now reports the whole machine is clean. However, it really ...
Evening doesn't go as planned (Though hopefully the memory leak is fixed now...)
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Snaking,
Vindaloo.
Did a bit of work tracking down memory leaks in TwistedSNMP. As Glyph and I had discussed, eliminating the __del__ methods from the Deferred object eliminated the leaks. My fix so far is pretty ugly (introduces two descriptors and a sub-object with a __del__ to provide the functionality, but it does work, so just a ...
With whom would I like to study? (Pondering question at a party while I can't sleep...)
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Design Theory.
So this question came up at a party (Sara's friend from a few posts back), and I didn't have any good idea. The problem is that most designers don't really do much with theory, and of those that do, few are doing anything particularly interesting these days.
I study at the meta-theory level, so I ...
More trips down memory lane (Care of Picasa...)
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Vindaloo.
I've just spent a few hours going through old folders of sketches and projects. Have added quite a few new images to the eye-candy page. Also removed all the second-generation sketches from the graphics page, replacing them with the "new" sketches from the eye candy page. I've left them in the eye candy page 'cause ...
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.