Category archives: Knight Errant

Questing and jousting and other entrepreneurial details

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Really need to get a "too far" alert (Too easy to fix just one figure flaw too many...)


Sometime on Saturday (or was that Sunday) I fixed a minor problem. Just refactoring away, found a bit of code that shouldn't be there, refactored it, moved onto the next thing that needed refactoring. I was working on the UI code at the time (which doesn't have a useful set of unit tests) and kept ...

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Long weekend of work hasn't yet gelled (People seem to want to have a holiday...)


Been trying to make this a productive weekend for the company. So far not going particularly well. Just sort of "lost" today with grocery shopping for dinner on Monday, little visits (spoiled a surprise gift because I thought that the recipients knew about it :( ), another shopping trip to get food for Soni's place, ...

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I would have thought this was "normal care" (Hiring and paying someone to do the book-keeping is not enough)


Apparently (so I am told), hiring someone to do the book-keeping for a company is not sufficient care in making sure the books are kept properly. Just seeing that witholdings are showing up on pay slips and assuming they are being remitted is not enough. Instead, the director is expected to track down and be ...

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A tip for owners of small businesses (If your bookkeeper is unwilling to show you the books, change bookkeepers...)


Learning a rather hard lesson these days. Just because you're paying someone to do a job and they claim to be doing it doesn't mean they really are doing it. When the person is supposed to be doing tax-related work, having them not get their job done can do more than just scuttle the company. ...

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Not much OpenGL hacking this weekend (But I got some general maintenance done and played a couple of games)


I spent much of the weekend trying to decompress from the week and finish recovering from the cold. I got a tiny bit of OpenGL work done, basically getting OpenGL extensions fixed for Win32. No big deal, after all, who uses Windows these days. Still, nice to have it fixed.

Also got the accounting for ...

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Falling behind can make you fall behind (When projects slip past hard deadlines...)


I've been undertaking a rather enormous restructuring of the VoIP billing system for a past few weeks. It's pretty close to finished, but it's not yet ready for prime time. Problem is, today is the first of the month, so the invoices must go out.

So, I've spent the last few days (when I wasn't ...

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Turns out it was only 1 (or 2) steps too far (Fear is the mind-killer...)


Reworking the refactoring of the system I got back on track and discovered that the design on Tuesday wasn't as bad as I'd thought. I'd obviously taken a step too far into abstraction, but the basic machinery (and the tables defining it) was a good approximation.

Anyway, I'm going to try to work on PyOpenGL ...

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Got too bold in refactoring (Point was to make a first step, not run a marathon)


Yesterday I continued my refactoring of the ISP/VoIP billing and provisioning system... and went too far. I realised I went too far around 4pm, then stayed up past 2am trying to scale back to a reasonable change-set.

The problem basically was that I got so into the project that I started fixing every problem simultaneously, ...

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Refactoring makes you bold about refactoring (5 hours head-down refactoring for client)


After my week's "vacation" during which I basically did refactoring on OpenGL-ctypes I sat down this morning to work on the VoIP provisioning/billing project and thought "I have to fix this stuff". Basically there were issues introduced by the original spec that never got refactored because they were so deep in the assumptions of the ...

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