Author archives: Mike

Apropos to the question of play in design, particularly the effect described in my thesis of providing a safe environment for exploring ideas:



What you see here is a fairly deep topic; getting caught up in trivialities and as a result losing the chance to demonstrate affection. It's something that's painful for many people, yet ...

Well, as everyone and their brother has been reporting, the DARPA race across the desert wound up with best showings of 7 miles (14km or so). Lots of coverage of the mechanical exoskeleton for soldiers as well.

Of course, coverage of Spirit and Opportunity has been phenomenal Still, they're expected to drive maybe a few ...

Went to bed right after work yesterday. Slept most of today. Yet still my eyes are sore and bloodshot. Keep getting up every few hours and trying to do a little work only to realise I'm not really in any shape for it. Suppose there's tomorrow.

Darryl has third in series of articles in his blog on using the Round Up API directly that I should take the time to read some day soon. Probably should have Tim read it as well, since the issue tracker is mostly his baby.

Well, it's finished. At least, everything is now reviewed and revised, with the code samples in colour-coded glory. Unfortunately, there's now 74 pages.

Got an email from customer' tech asking me to review the logs and see if there was a problem on our end during a given period. So, I check, which takes an hour or so of poking around in various log tables on various running instances, and then start drafting email to say basically "no, ...

So either I'm getting too deep and forgetting the audience, or the whole of the presentation is starting to make sense. Still need the section discussing how to decide when to use them, and a review of how metaclasses fit into the goals of meta-programming. It's fairly clear IMO, however, so yay. It's a much ...

Getting there on the full-plant simulation front. Discovered a serious bug in the OIDStore implementations in TwistedSNMP this evening, they were storing with naive alphabetical order when the requirement is for numeric ordering. There's a new release on SourceForge.

The computer is basically rebuilt. Spent 3 or 4 hours on mechanism to mock up entire SNMP plants, then switched to doing the metaclass presentation. The presentation is going well. Working out kinks in the original, expanding more on what "meta-programming" is, with far more detail on use-cases for metaclasses as examples of meta-programming.

Last night went okay; after about 8 different attempts I remembered that for some reason Win2K doesn't like disks > 30GB with Fat32, so no extra "user" space (shared with 2K and Linux) with the new drive. I reached that plateau in an installation where the next logical step commits you to the action. Now that ...