Category archives: Vindaloo
Discussions of the spice of life, spices, and/or life.
Joomla, Wims, Mozilla (Webby...)
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Vindaloo.
First three sessions at the conference over. Wims appears to be a framework for writing web quizzes. It apparently has an embedding mechanism for adding those quizzes to courses using the open source course mgmt software (blanking on name right now).
Joomla 1.5 seems like it's primarily a refactor and clean up. Useful sounding for ...
Pleasant walk around a night market (Very generous hosts...)
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Vindaloo.
Our hosts took us for a walk around one of the night markets this evening (after treating us to a very well done dim sum dinner). The night market is a very large, intense and close version of the shops down in Chinatown (or Kensington Market), but without the need to close everything in, so ...
Quick walk while the process runs (At least I got out of the air conditioning...)
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Vindaloo.
Feel so stupid sitting here coding software at home. Two bugs found, one a straightforward "duh", the other a scaling issue that didn't show up in the tests, with a straightforward fix. Still, that's 4 hours of my time here gone.
Went for a walk as the final run was working. Just around the block. ...
Little things to remember (What not to do when travelling...)
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Vindaloo.
Just got into the room about 40 minutes ago. Total door-to-door travel time of 33.5 hours. Things to remember in the future:
When figuring out how much time you have left on your passport, remember to calculate based on the day you arrive in the country, not the day you leave your own country. My ...
WiFi is Free in Vancouver (Promised land...)
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Vindaloo.
In Vancouver airport, at my departure gate about 5 hours early. Unlike at Pearson (Toronto) airport, the network access is free. Darn right it should be free.
Flight over Canada was non-eventful. Seat-mate was asleep the entire flight. Had a neat encounter on the subway, lady who had a severe brain hemorrhage when she was ...
Excited about Tomorrow (Even if today was a bit of a wash...)
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Design Theory,
Vindaloo,
Young Coders.
Spent the whole day on errands. Found a place to print out photos for my mother in law at $0.17 each (with 300 of them), picked up firewire cables for the video camera, dumped the wedding video to DVD so that she can take that with her too. Bit of a bug-fix for an infrequent ...
Bell Canada Labs (Then errands for 4 hours)
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Vindaloo,
Young Coders.
Presented the project down at Bell Canada this morning. Quiet meeting, only two people asking how to get involved. Hopefully just needs to percolate a bit. Anyway, two people is good if they do something wonderful :) .
After that spent the bulk of the day on various errands around town, picking up wedding dresses ...
I want to teach somewhere (Get all this stuff off my plate some day soon...)
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Vindaloo.
Putting together the presentation for this evening. It would be so much more fun if I was paid to teach people things. Oh well. For now need to try to get some work done before errands kill the day's productivity.
Long Weekends, Long Walks (A few days off...)
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Snaking,
Vindaloo.
This was the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in Canada. Had the family over on Sunday (yay!), worked on Saturday, but today was just for relaxing. Went through my OpenGL folder (well, the last 100 or so messages) and fixed a couple of small bugs. I want to release a 3.0.0b1 this week, so if you have ...
Messy Jobs are Never-Ending (Clean jobs a disappearing breed...)
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Design Theory,
Knight Errant,
Vindaloo.
Sitting here working I find myself reflecting on the fact that messy jobs are never "finished." By messy I mean jobs that are complex and multi-faceted and have no particular "right solution". In contrast, the clean jobs, the ones where you just need to solve a problem and know that you have the correct answer, ...
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.