Category archives: Knight Errant
Questing and jousting and other entrepreneurial details
I hate details (They get in the way of the great plans...)
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Knight Errant.
After days and days of work building test cases and testing on database images I ran a "fix a screw up" script yesterday only to find out this morning that the "fix" wound up making the problem far, far, worse. Spent the entire day trying to fix that today.
The problem, it turns out, is ...
Pause before unleashing the fix (What have I messed up...)
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Knight Errant.
About to run the fix-up script for an error that's about 1.5 weeks old now. The script generates 337 emails to customers, alters the database in 4 or 5 ways and generally has all sorts of ways in which it could screw up in very public and end-customer-annoying ways.
I've just run a test run ...
This week was just too long (Treading water...)
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Knight Errant.
My plan last Wednesday was to get a given feature finished, have the customer review it on Thursday and then do some polishing. Various factors killed my productivity on Wednesday and Thursday (much of it being an aborted attempt to create the "right" system instead of the "right now" system). Still, woke up Friday planning ...
Refactoring fatigue setting in (Upgrade scripts making me sick...)
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Knight Errant.
I'm continuing to refactor the ISP/VoIP billing system as I add new features. Spent most of today working on a state-table based sub-system... sometime around 11pm I started writing yet another upgrade script (in the infinite series of upgrades scripts that is my life) and realised I should just back off half the changes again. ...
Slept the day away (Up late, 4 minutes of work, jog up and down some stairs, back to bed...)
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Knight Errant.
Didn't quite get rid of the headache. Spent the bulk of the day in bed hoping it would dissipate. Still a bit of it lingering, but it only hurts if I let the muscles get tense. So, anyway, instead of PyOpenGL I'm working on work-work tonight. Shopping for a new laptop tomorrow.
A certain quiet satisfaction (Jobs done and books up-to-date...)
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Knight Errant.
I've just finished catching up on all of the accounting for the company. This month was hectic with the old company issues, so I wound up losing about 3 weeks in the middle where I was dealing with that. As a result I neglected the accounting in the new company (bad). Tonight I stayed up ...
Subtle little bug in a library costs me a few hours (Sigh...)
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Knight Errant.
I've been working on merging the last month and a half of mainline changes into the restructured tree. It went very well for the most part, there were some changes from last month that caused a conflict or two, but nothing major, or so it seemed.
However, at some point during the merging I started ...
I want to do 3D graphics today (No chance though...)
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Knight Errant.
I'm basically finished working through the implications of the restructuring for the part that can be finished this year. Have now been going through and cleaning up test cases and porting changes from the HEAD into the development branch. It's been 1.5 months since I forked the code to work on this. A lot of ...
That goes reasonably well (Apparently giving up on sleep is the answer...)
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Knight Errant,
Tuxedo.
I just gave up on sleeping last night and kept pounding on the code. My hands aren't happy with me, but there are only a very small number of bits still to convert (as far as I can see). While I've been working I've also had the computer compiling Eric/PyQt/SIP/QScintilla (yay, it works, secret is ...
Oh, I'll just fix that little problem (He says for the hundredth time, knowing as he does it's a mistake...)
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Knight Errant.
I seem to have fallen into a never-ending abyss of little fixes and an infinite regress of minor details. As I've been try to get back to stability I keep seeing little things that I know I should leave "broken", but "it'll only take 20 minutes"... which is turning this into a very long and ...
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.