Category archives: Knight Errant
Questing and jousting and other entrepreneurial details
Just 1.5 days left (Little odds and ends of work...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant,
Young Coders.
We spent the whole day on billing-system stuff, nothing huge, just going through and seeing which tickets we can get done before we head off to Italy. Bit of project management too, grooming the ticket-tracker to find the old, already-finished tickets, marking tickets waiting that are blocked, that kind of thing.
Tomorrow will be more ...
Reasonable day's work (Despite an afternoon nap...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant,
Young Coders.
Soni and I were just too tired to go back to work after lunch today. Wound up sleeping for 3 hours until just before Simon and Fan dropped in. Simon's going to try to drop into the Toronto OLPC Developer's group at Linux Caffe tomorrow (Thursday) night (7pm).
Since they left we've been head-down-and-working. A ...
PyGame wrappers and documentation and new developers (Long-ish day with client stuff too...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant,
Young Coders.
Tested the OLPC-Games group's PyGame wrapper on the developer's image. It works nicely on the emulated machine. Looking over the code, they are basically using an SDL feature that lets SDL take over a GTK (or whatever) window in order to integrate into the Sugar desktop.
That is, the application has to have the GTK ...
Tomorrow is make clients happy day! Yay! (Push through all day to do the non-OLPC stuff)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
We've been doing training during the non-OLPC hours this week; tomorrow is going to be head-down coding instead. Going to try to make the gentle sound of tickets falling echo the rain now outside my window...
But tonight is done and I shall sleep.
Maybe a bit too clever in the Postgresql usage ("In case I want to do what I never want to do" bites me...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
Fighting a bug in a billing process most of the afternoon. Basically two errors, one a memory error and one a database buffer exhaustion error. The first I haven't tracked down, but I did work around it. The second appears to be a side effect of a never-used set of features in PyTable that allow ...
Handling dividends (I am *so* not an accountant...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
Sat down with a friend who's an accountant and tried to get them to explain how to do dividends and year-end closing for a company on the accounting side. As near as I can figure it, recording the dividends works like this:
Dividend Expense (the account I was missing) gets a ${DIVIDEND} expense, Dividend Liability ...
Handling dividends (I am *so* not an accountant...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
Sat down with a friend who's an accountant and tried to get them to explain how to do dividends and year-end closing for a company on the accounting side. As near as I can figure it, recording the dividends works like this:
Dividend Expense (the account I was missing) gets a ${DIVIDEND} expense, Dividend Liability ...
Not my day for networking (Locked out of the work svn server...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
Our SVN server is pretty tightly locked down using pftables so that only authorised addresses can connect to the ssh. I log into a secondary box and from there log into the SVN machine and update it if I'm away from a known IP range. But today the pf script won't update to let in ...
Not my day for networking (Locked out of the work svn server...)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
Our SVN server is pretty tightly locked down using pftables so that only authorised addresses can connect to the ssh. I log into a secondary box and from there log into the SVN machine and update it if I'm away from a known IP range. But today the pf script won't update to let in ...
Stabilisation period after a long crunch (A few days of just tracking down anything broken)
Written by
on
in
Knight Errant.
We've had some pretty extensive rewriting going on for the last few months in one of the big customer projects (the VoIP billing system). Spending three or four days in here stabilising the code base, tracking down all the little refactoring errors that didn't get caught with the test suite, fixing bugs that fell into ...
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.