Author archives: Mike
Pythius.aop, aspect-oriented toolkit (Maybe I'm missing the point...)
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Snaking.
Aspect oriented programming is an attempt to allow for defining orthogonal aspects of an application in such way that they can be (seamlessly) woven together at run time. pythius' aop.py module provides the machinery for weaving things together (and yes, it does use a metaclass), but doesn't seem to provide global weaving functionality.
PyProtocols needs documentation... (Who am I to throw stones)
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Snaking.
Okay, dirty little secret, PyProtocols uses metaclasses in a really extreme way. I assumed they would, and in looking, yes they do. There's rather a lack of real code being demo'd though. For instance, what does a "normal" class + interface declaration look like? Hard to tell, as the test cases are quite round-about in ...
OpenOffice Presenter has no style... (Why disable a general mechanism for a specific app?)
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Vindaloo.
OO Presenter has this annoying restriction that you can't define new styles. The annoying thing is that the program is obviously style aware (you can change existing styles using the same stylist as everywhere else in OO). Means that I wind up either having to use an outline level to mean "source code sample", or ...
Rob says hi (Old collegue from Tpresence drops a line)
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Vindaloo.
Have been chatting with Rob Ashbaugh for a last few days via email. Rob was the office manager and financial guy, wonderful sense of humour. Spent a lot of time sitting around chatting with him back then.
Yet more licensing silliness... (GPL licensing kills another hour)
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Snaking.
Wasted almost an hour there on debate regarding GPL and FSF licensing issues. There's a weird entry in the GPL FAQ which tries to claim that using a GPL plug-in with a proprietary application is somehow violating the GPL on the plug-in. Can't see the logic of it. Oh well, glad I avoid the whole ...
No SVG support for OO Presenter... (Ah, for a standard 2D graphics format that works...)
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Vindaloo.
Continuing explorations with Dia for setting up graphics for metaclasses presentation. Discovered that Dia does weird things when exporting to PNG (looks like it makes the text 1 or 2 pt). Tried SVG only to discover that OpenOffice.org Presenter doesn't import that (neither does my old Corel Draw).
Perception is mostly expectation (Recent thoughts on constructing perceiving machines...)
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Design Theory.
Our perceptual systems operate in such a way that we construct an internal model of our environment then react when the world around us differs from that model. In effect, we predict or "render" the world as we expect it to be and see if the world matches that prediction. We give lots of extra ...
Flushing... (New specs for old projects...)
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Snaking.
Doing some work this morning on customer-related business. Basically just flushing some (very large) caches so old data doesn't show up in a report. This, of course, has never been done before, as it's not part of the spec for how the system works. Worse yet, need to do it on the live system. Not ...
Metaclasses must be done... (How even licensing screeds seem important when procrastinating...)
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Snaking.
Last night was almost a total wash for getting the metaclass presentation done. I spent most of the time just rearranging the text and realising that it's pretty tight already. I've come to the conclusion that most of the problems are just organisational (and the lack of support for alternate learning modes). Wound up wasting ...
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.