So the flights and hotel are booked and it's confirmed: I am going to EuroPython. This will only be my second attendance, and since it's in England this year close to where my one of my sisters lives I expect to feel reasonably at home. It won't be a long trip, but John Pinner tells me he'd like me to give a talk about the PSF and an after-dinner speech, and that "we may like you to join a panel or two, Open Space etc as well if that's OK".
Since the conference is paying my travel and accommodation it would seem ungracious to refuse. So it looks like I'll be busy. I am already looking forward to it!
One of the nice parts of visiting the Midlands will be a chance to sample some British beers. If you have any recommendations or suggestions please be sure to let me know!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
May 22, 2009
May 21, 2009
Trying Again
I believe my typesetting confusion of recent days was due not, as I had feared, to my advancing years and inability to solve technical problems, but rather to a discrepancy between Blogger's preview and the final display of the blog, plus the absence of div tags.
The output of the program in Blogging Python Output: A Challenge should have displayed as
Let's see if this survives being saved and published, as so few have before it.
The output of the program in Blogging Python Output: A Challenge should have displayed as
<__main__.MyCls object at 0x024217F0>
Factory Functions
In the last entry we discussed passing callables (using functions and classes) as arguments to functions, and calling them within the body of the function. This time we'll look at how functions can return more esoteric objects - again including functions and classes.
Beginners sometimes ask how a function can be made to return "more than one object". The strict answer is that it can't. The single object it returns can be a container, though, allowing several values to be extracted from the returned object. If you want a function to return three values the easiest way to arrange this is to have it return a three-element tuple, and then extract the individual values using an unpacking assignment. Here's a simple example.
This prints 10 100 1000, showing that the three returned values have indeed been assigned to individual variables. Functions can return more complex objects than simple containers, though. A frequent example in the programming literature is a function that returns some newly-created function each time it is called. Typically the function returned will vary according to one or more of the arguments passed to the call that creates it.
A call to make_fun() results in a function being defined as make_fun's function body is being executed. This function (whose local name is pow) contains references to the arguments passed to make_fun, and is returned by the call to make_fun to be assigned and eventually called. The calls to the function are inside a list comprehension just because that's the easiest way to call a set of functions with the same argument(s).
The output from this is
The debugging output from cuber is seen before the list comprehension because all calls have to return their values before the list comprehension is complete and ready for printing.
You may be familiar with the concept of a mixin class. Such classes are designed to take advantage of Python's multiple inheritance features to add functionality to any chosen classes, by creating a new class which is a subclass of both the mixin and the chosen class. You can see an exellent example of this in the socket library, where a ThreadingMixIn class is defined and can be used to extend the features of the basic UDPServer class like this:
Note that the newly-declared ThreadingUDPServer class doesn't specify any behavior of its own, it merely inherits - first from the mixin and then from the base class, meaning that methods defined in the mixin take precedence over those defined in the base server class. One problem with this, however, is that it doesn't allow for any variation in the mixin classes - by the time you use them they are already created, and it's too late.
In the same way that we can parameterize functions, however, we can parameterize classes as well. Suppose we want to provide a trivial mixin to print the class's name in either upper- or lower-case. Not very inspiring, but the simplest example I could think of to get the point over, so please bear with me if you can think of simpler ways to do this. One possibility is this.
Here the function first defines a mixin class, then creates a new class from the mixin and the base class provided as an argument. The interpreter cares not at all where the class definitions come from - classes are first-class objects just like functions and strings, and can just as easily be passed as function arguments as obtained any other way.
The output from the program, which I am sure you are waiting for with bated breath, is
which shows that the program runs, and that the mixin class's behavior is conditioned by the function's second argument.
Now you might choose to argue that this isn't a very natural example, and I'd be inclined to agree with you. All I have to say besides that is, you try coming up with these examples and see how you like it. If anyone chooses to contribute a more natural example that can be expressed without too much extra code I'll be happy to write about it.
Beginners sometimes ask how a function can be made to return "more than one object". The strict answer is that it can't. The single object it returns can be a container, though, allowing several values to be extracted from the returned object. If you want a function to return three values the easiest way to arrange this is to have it return a three-element tuple, and then extract the individual values using an unpacking assignment. Here's a simple example.
def powers(a):
return a, a*a, a*a*a
a, square, cube = powers(10)
print(a, square, cube)
def make_fun(power, debug=False):
def pow(x):
result = x ** power
if debug:
print("power(%s, %s) returned" % (x, power), result)
return result
return pow
squarer = make_fun(2)
cuber = make_fun(3, True)
print([f(9) for f in (squarer, cuber)])
The output from this is
power(9, 3) returned 729
[81, 729]
You may be familiar with the concept of a mixin class. Such classes are designed to take advantage of Python's multiple inheritance features to add functionality to any chosen classes, by creating a new class which is a subclass of both the mixin and the chosen class. You can see an exellent example of this in the socket library, where a ThreadingMixIn class is defined and can be used to extend the features of the basic UDPServer class like this:
class ThreadingUDPServer(ThreadingMixIn, UDPServer): pass
In the same way that we can parameterize functions, however, we can parameterize classes as well. Suppose we want to provide a trivial mixin to print the class's name in either upper- or lower-case. Not very inspiring, but the simplest example I could think of to get the point over, so please bear with me if you can think of simpler ways to do this. One possibility is this.
def mixin(cls, lcase=True):
class Mixin:
def nprint(self):
if lcase:
print(str(cls).lower())
else:
print(str(cls).upper())
class Result(Mixin, cls):
pass
return Result
class FirstClass:
pass
Cl1 = mixin(FirstClass, True)
cl1 = Cl1()
cl1.nprint()
mixin(FirstClass, False)().nprint()
Here the function first defines a mixin class, then creates a new class from the mixin and the base class provided as an argument. The interpreter cares not at all where the class definitions come from - classes are first-class objects just like functions and strings, and can just as easily be passed as function arguments as obtained any other way.
The output from the program, which I am sure you are waiting for with bated breath, is
<class '__main__.firstclass'>
<CLASS '__MAIN__.FIRSTCLASS'>
Now you might choose to argue that this isn't a very natural example, and I'd be inclined to agree with you. All I have to say besides that is, you try coming up with these examples and see how you like it. If anyone chooses to contribute a more natural example that can be expressed without too much extra code I'll be happy to write about it.
May 20, 2009
Blogging Python Output: A Challenge
I spent half an hour yesterday in a battle with Bogger, trying to get it to render the output of this Python 3 program:
Unfortunately, despite batting to with HTML entities for less than and the like, and even changing all spaces to non-breaking spaces*, the best I seem to be able to do is:
<__main__.mycls>
It starts out looking OK, but once I preview it, or publish it, Blogger just throws away everything after the first space up to the closing angle. Who can tell me what I am doing wrong? Or is Blogger being unfair.
* don't even think about blogging the actual entity codes: they'll be mangled too.
[The program will run, producing slightly different output, under Python 2. I suspect Blogger will mangle that output too]
class MyCls:
pass
obj = MyCls()
print(obj)
<__main__.mycls>
It starts out looking OK, but once I preview it, or publish it, Blogger just throws away everything after the first space up to the closing angle. Who can tell me what I am doing wrong? Or is Blogger being unfair.
* don't even think about blogging the actual entity codes: they'll be mangled too.
[The program will run, producing slightly different output, under Python 2. I suspect Blogger will mangle that output too]
Everything's an Object
"Everything's an object" is a truism for truly object-oriented languages, and Python is truly object-oriented. You may meet some purists who try to tell you that only [their favorite language] can really be called object-oriented, because Python doesn't have this feature or that feature, but don't take any notice of them. Religious zealots are everywhere, and their only interest is to convert you to their faith. In the Python world we don't tend to hold with religious zeal, and much prefer irreverent comedy sketches and making fun of things. Particularly religious zealots.
Newcomers to the language are sometimes surprised to find that you can pass all kinds of things as arguments to functions, and use them quite naturally inside the functions. The classic example is functions themselves. Let's write a program containing an innocuous little function that takes a function as its first argument and returns the result of calling the function on its second and third arguments.
The adder function adds two arguments, and pass that as the first argument to caller a couple of times. If all has gone to plan the first two lines of output will look like this:
The call to caller returns an instance of MyCls. When that instance's method() is called it uses the remembered arguments to print out a string of ten equals signs:
==========
The generality that this demonstrates can be difficult to get used to if you haven't come across anything like it before. Once you appreciate it, though, it gives you a flexibility that is hard to match in many other languages. That's one of the reasons why the Python world often talks about "callables": we don't care whether it's a function or a class, we only care that it can be called.
This is one aspect of polymorphism, one of the foundations of object-oriented programming.
[The code will run under Python 2, but the output shown here was produce by Python 3. The output from Python 2 will differ slightly].
Newcomers to the language are sometimes surprised to find that you can pass all kinds of things as arguments to functions, and use them quite naturally inside the functions. The classic example is functions themselves. Let's write a program containing an innocuous little function that takes a function as its first argument and returns the result of calling the function on its second and third arguments.
def caller(f, a, b):
return f(a, b)
def adder(x, y):
return x+y
print(caller(adder, "abc", "def"))
print(caller(adder, 123, 456))
class MyCls:
def __init__(self, first, second):
self.first = first
self.second = second
def method(self):
return self.first*self.second
obj = caller(MyCls, "=", 10)
print(obj, obj.method())
abcdefThe first argument to adder isn't constrained to be a function. It just has to be something that can be called.We can take advantage of the fact that a call to a class creates an instance of the class to have caller create the instance for us. The MyCls class has an __init__() method that takes two arguments (as well as the ubiquitous self that the zealots will try and persuade you isn't necessary).
579
The call to caller returns an instance of MyCls. When that instance's method() is called it uses the remembered arguments to print out a string of ten equals signs:
==========
The generality that this demonstrates can be difficult to get used to if you haven't come across anything like it before. Once you appreciate it, though, it gives you a flexibility that is hard to match in many other languages. That's one of the reasons why the Python world often talks about "callables": we don't care whether it's a function or a class, we only care that it can be called.
This is one aspect of polymorphism, one of the foundations of object-oriented programming.
[The code will run under Python 2, but the output shown here was produce by Python 3. The output from Python 2 will differ slightly].
May 19, 2009
Who's Up for a Sprint, Then?
It's now a good long time since Need for Speed (three years, I find, rather to my surprise), and I have settled back into a more or less regular routine after my move back to the USA. So I am starting to wonder whether it might not be time for another speed-focused sprint, and this post represents a first attempt to run the idea up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
There have been many interesting developments on the VM front in the intervening years, and it seems like there's a distinct possibility that the current speed limits are going to be history in a year's time. That being the case, I would be prepared to put some effort into getting sponsorship and doing the administration and organization.
I was wondering about Amsterdam as a venue. Given the required lead times to recruit sponsors, get sprinters on board and ensure adequate accommodation I am thinking that the best time might betowards the end of the year - say October or November.
Who thinks this could be helpful? Who'd like to join in and sprint? Who would contribute funding to make it happen? All these questions are important, and only you can answer them!
There have been many interesting developments on the VM front in the intervening years, and it seems like there's a distinct possibility that the current speed limits are going to be history in a year's time. That being the case, I would be prepared to put some effort into getting sponsorship and doing the administration and organization.
I was wondering about Amsterdam as a venue. Given the required lead times to recruit sponsors, get sprinters on board and ensure adequate accommodation I am thinking that the best time might betowards the end of the year - say October or November.
Who thinks this could be helpful? Who'd like to join in and sprint? Who would contribute funding to make it happen? All these questions are important, and only you can answer them!
Is It Installed or Not?
[Notes for a while back, as can be seen by the version numbering]
Hmm. What could be the problem here?
Hmm. What could be the problem here?
Simple, once realized: the easy_install I was running was based on Python for Windows, so running it under Cygwin still reported the state of the Windows installation! That's one slight down-side to Cygwin picking up so mcuh from the Windows side of things: sometimes it gets holds of things it shouldn't.
sholden@bigboy ~
$ easy_install-2.5 SQLAlchemy
Searching for SQLAlchemy
Best match: sqlalchemy 0.4.2dev-r3811
Processing sqlalchemy-0.4.2dev_r3811-py2.5.egg
sqlalchemy 0.4.2dev-r3811 is already the active version in easy-install.pth
Using c:\python25\lib\site-packages\sqlalchemy-0.4.2dev_r3811-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for SQLAlchemy
Finished processing dependencies for SQLAlchemy
sholden@bigboy ~
$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, May 18 2007, 16:56:43)
[GCC 3.4.4 (cygming special, gdc 0.12, using dmd 0.125)] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sqlalchemy
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
ImportError: No module named sqlalchemy
>>>
May 18, 2009
Simple Object Interactions
Here's a relatively simple piece of code that shows how easy it is to have Python objects interact. It's fairly standard stuff, so it probably won't be interesting to old hands, but if you haven't been using object-oriented programming very long then it might make a point or two.
Note that the code is in Python 3, though it will actually run on earlier versions, the printing will just be slightly different.
Colloquially we could say that each Agent "knows" which Simulation it's a part of. So an Agent is able to call the methods of the simulation that it's a part of. This makes it possible to devise agents that call various simulation methods, and to incorporate them in several different simulations which implement those methods differently.
When building large data structures with this kind of pattern, by the way, it's important to note that the references are circular (simulations refer to agents, and agents refer to simulations). The garbage collector in older versions of Python would have real difficulties with structures such as the ones created in the code above. In essence it would say to itself "Well, I can't delete the simulation until I have deleted all the agents it refers to." Then it would look at all the agents, and for each one it would say to itself "I can't delete this until I have deleted the simulation it refers to". An unintelligent garbage collection might get stuck in an infinite loop here, but Python's garbage collector has never been that stupid.
Nowadays, I am happy to say, in Python 2 or 3 the collector is able to recognize these cyclic references and, as long as there are no references to such a structure from the outside, will (eventually) reclaim the space.
Next time we'll consider how a simulation might use several types of agents, still providing common behavior for them all.
Note that the code is in Python 3, though it will actually run on earlier versions, the printing will just be slightly different.
#So, we start out with a class whose __init__() method is called with one argument, the number of agents to create. It creates a list of that many agents as its agents attribute. Note that when the Agent is created the Simulation instance passes itself as an argument to the Agent creator, and the Agent.__init__() method saves the reference to the Simulation instance as the Agent's sim instance variable.
# Calling all reactive agents (with apologies to William Burroughs)
#
class Simulation:
def __init__(self, howmany):
self.agents = []
for i in range(howmany):
self.agents.append(Agent(self, i))
def showImportant(self, agent):
return "Agent: %d simulation: %d" % (agent.number, id(self))
def listAgents(self):
for a in self.agents:
a.showMe()
class Agent:
def __init__(self, sim, number):
self.sim = sim
self.number = number
def showMe(self):
print("Agent", self.number, "reporting:")
result = self.sim.showImportant(self)
print(result)
s = Simulation(3)
s.listAgents()
Colloquially we could say that each Agent "knows" which Simulation it's a part of. So an Agent is able to call the methods of the simulation that it's a part of. This makes it possible to devise agents that call various simulation methods, and to incorporate them in several different simulations which implement those methods differently.
When building large data structures with this kind of pattern, by the way, it's important to note that the references are circular (simulations refer to agents, and agents refer to simulations). The garbage collector in older versions of Python would have real difficulties with structures such as the ones created in the code above. In essence it would say to itself "Well, I can't delete the simulation until I have deleted all the agents it refers to." Then it would look at all the agents, and for each one it would say to itself "I can't delete this until I have deleted the simulation it refers to". An unintelligent garbage collection might get stuck in an infinite loop here, but Python's garbage collector has never been that stupid.
Nowadays, I am happy to say, in Python 2 or 3 the collector is able to recognize these cyclic references and, as long as there are no references to such a structure from the outside, will (eventually) reclaim the space.
Next time we'll consider how a simulation might use several types of agents, still providing common behavior for them all.
May 17, 2009
Python is So Versatile
Even though I use Python all the time, and I am well-connected in the Python world, so much is happening that it's difficult to stay in touch with everything Python. Taking a look at the Python Package Index, in just the last 24 hours there have been over 40 submissions. Not all of them will be new releases, but it's instructive to take a look at what's come in to PyPI as an indication of the breadth of applications in which Python is used. Rather than list all 40 submissions available from the RSS feed, let's just take a look at some of the more interesting items.
You could use the new release of Dumbo to write programs in Hadoop, the language for specifying massively parallel map-reduce computations. With AMFast you could create rich Internet applications using Flash remoting. If you wanted to write a Unix daemon in Python you could use the python-daemon library that implements PEP 3143. You could write a network time client with ntplib.
If you wanted to add automated image processing to your Django web application you could do it with django-imagekit, or you could add AJAX with Dajax. To make it useful to a broader audience you could add django-bidi-utils to handle bi-directional text.
You might want to analyze some PDF files, in which case you could use pdfminer. If you are more interested in structural bioinformatics research then Biskit might be more your cup of tea. With all this complex software flying around you might need a program to handle a structured to-do list, and Task Coach would be ready and waiting for you.
There's also a slew of Zope and Plone components to add to these already very capable systems. Python is just so versatile!
You could use the new release of Dumbo to write programs in Hadoop, the language for specifying massively parallel map-reduce computations. With AMFast you could create rich Internet applications using Flash remoting. If you wanted to write a Unix daemon in Python you could use the python-daemon library that implements PEP 3143. You could write a network time client with ntplib.
If you wanted to add automated image processing to your Django web application you could do it with django-imagekit, or you could add AJAX with Dajax. To make it useful to a broader audience you could add django-bidi-utils to handle bi-directional text.
You might want to analyze some PDF files, in which case you could use pdfminer. If you are more interested in structural bioinformatics research then Biskit might be more your cup of tea. With all this complex software flying around you might need a program to handle a structured to-do list, and Task Coach would be ready and waiting for you.
There's also a slew of Zope and Plone components to add to these already very capable systems. Python is just so versatile!
May 16, 2009
Python Booth at OSCON
For the first time this year Python will have a booth at OSCON, thanks to the good offices of Aahz. If you'd like to keep the Python banner flying over the exhibition hall I am sure he could do with some help.
What's the point? Well, certainly it will help to raise awareness of the language, which can only be a good thing. Having a booth puts a human face on Python and gives people a chance to get first-hand information rather than being filtered through other people's prejudices. OSCON is probably the largest open source conference in the world, so it's a good place to advertise the best open source language in the world.
The Python Software Foundation will be funding a large banner, and whatever else is required. I am sure Aahz will be happy to have suggestions and (most especially) offers of assistance. I've spent time in the past manning exhibition stands, and while it's interesting to meet a wide range of people it can be surprisingly tiring, so a one-man effort won't be enough. You can subscribe to the Python OSCON mailing list if you are interested in helping with either or both of the planning and execution.
What's the point? Well, certainly it will help to raise awareness of the language, which can only be a good thing. Having a booth puts a human face on Python and gives people a chance to get first-hand information rather than being filtered through other people's prejudices. OSCON is probably the largest open source conference in the world, so it's a good place to advertise the best open source language in the world.
The Python Software Foundation will be funding a large banner, and whatever else is required. I am sure Aahz will be happy to have suggestions and (most especially) offers of assistance. I've spent time in the past manning exhibition stands, and while it's interesting to meet a wide range of people it can be surprisingly tiring, so a one-man effort won't be enough. You can subscribe to the Python OSCON mailing list if you are interested in helping with either or both of the planning and execution.
May 14, 2009
Help Files Should Help, Right?
Microsoft Documentation Sucks
God knows I've had my complaints about Microsoft documentation in the past. Often about manuals consisting mostly of descriptions of the following nature:
Ubuntu/Gnome Documentation Sucks
That said, I hope I am setting myself up for a fall here. I've just installed a number of Ubuntu 8.04 virtuals (because I want to be compatible with a client environment, since you ask), and I have been having problems getting the network interfaces to behave. So I go to the help file for the GUI-based networking tool so kindly provided, and the main portion is filled with this sort of idiocy:
The really annoying piece is that I went to the help file to try and get an understanding of the roaming mode, only to discover that this steaming pile of placemarkers* masquerading as documentation contains zero mention of the one interface feature I needed to know about. They could at least have had a section saying "Check this box to put the interface into roaming mode".
I am really hoping that this documentation has improved a lot in the two versions of Ubuntu that have been released since 8.04. If not, then it's time somebody (either at the Gnome Foundation or at Canonical) started to give some serious attention to documentation. Help files that don't help are a major source of end-user frustration.
Somebody, please put me out of my misery and tell me that this nonsense is gone in more recent releases. Otherwise I might just have to go home and bang my head against the wall.
The Real Problem
All of this is merely subsidiary to the real issue, which is how to I get a VirtualBox Ubuntu guest running under a Windows Vista host to track changes in the Vista internet connectivity. It seems like every time I change locations I have to spend time tweaking settings on the virtuals, rebooting uselessly and generally poking things until I get them to work without any clear idea of the eventually successful strategy.
So, dear lazyweb, please help me. If there's a manual that explains this I'd be happy to make a donation to its author. The open source world should, in my less than humbe opinion, value good documentation as much as (or more than) good code. Once you get past the obvious, the docs help you more than the code.
* Admit it, you though I was going to write "dung" there, didn't you? I am trying to eschew the obvious.
God knows I've had my complaints about Microsoft documentation in the past. Often about manuals consisting mostly of descriptions of the following nature:
Threep NardlingFrankly this kind of documentation is worse than useless - it elevates statement of the bleeding obvious to new heights, and frustrates all users with at least one eye and half a brain. If you don't know what a threep is, or when it might usefully be nardled, the implication is that you are in the wrong place (though quite where else you would be expected to go for this information escapes me).
To nardle threeps, select the Threep tab and check the Nardling checkbox.
Ubuntu/Gnome Documentation Sucks
That said, I hope I am setting myself up for a fall here. I've just installed a number of Ubuntu 8.04 virtuals (because I want to be compatible with a client environment, since you ask), and I have been having problems getting the network interfaces to behave. So I go to the help file for the GUI-based networking tool so kindly provided, and the main portion is filled with this sort of idiocy:
The really annoying piece is that I went to the help file to try and get an understanding of the roaming mode, only to discover that this steaming pile of placemarkers* masquerading as documentation contains zero mention of the one interface feature I needed to know about. They could at least have had a section saying "Check this box to put the interface into roaming mode".I am really hoping that this documentation has improved a lot in the two versions of Ubuntu that have been released since 8.04. If not, then it's time somebody (either at the Gnome Foundation or at Canonical) started to give some serious attention to documentation. Help files that don't help are a major source of end-user frustration.
Somebody, please put me out of my misery and tell me that this nonsense is gone in more recent releases. Otherwise I might just have to go home and bang my head against the wall.
The Real Problem
All of this is merely subsidiary to the real issue, which is how to I get a VirtualBox Ubuntu guest running under a Windows Vista host to track changes in the Vista internet connectivity. It seems like every time I change locations I have to spend time tweaking settings on the virtuals, rebooting uselessly and generally poking things until I get them to work without any clear idea of the eventually successful strategy.
So, dear lazyweb, please help me. If there's a manual that explains this I'd be happy to make a donation to its author. The open source world should, in my less than humbe opinion, value good documentation as much as (or more than) good code. Once you get past the obvious, the docs help you more than the code.
* Admit it, you though I was going to write "dung" there, didn't you? I am trying to eschew the obvious.
May 10, 2009
SCO's Inevitable End Moves Closer
A recent development in SCO's Chapter 11 bankruptcy takes the company still closer to its inevitable final demise. Groklaw reports that the US trustee has filed a motion to convert the bankruptcy proceedings from Chapter 11 (reorganization under protection from creditors) to Chapter 7 (liquidation of the business).
Darl McBride, somewhat predictably, is quoted as saying he was surprised by the decision, and that the company will fight it. This doesn't hide the fact that a bankrupt strategy will lead to a bankrupt company. The current stock price of $0.15 capitalizes the company at just over $3 million. How are the mighty fallen.
Darl McBride, somewhat predictably, is quoted as saying he was surprised by the decision, and that the company will fight it. This doesn't hide the fact that a bankrupt strategy will lead to a bankrupt company. The current stock price of $0.15 capitalizes the company at just over $3 million. How are the mighty fallen.
April 30, 2009
Another Award for Python
With the month of May comes notification from Linux Journal that Python has won their 2009 Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Programming Language, narrowly beating C++ and Java. The favorite scripting language was bash.
Last year there were some fairly obscure rules about what constituted a programming language and a scripting language. This year the readers themselves decided, and Python also did quite well in the second category.
“In an industry conceived, created and driven by peers, an accolade from the community is the highest compliment you can get,” said Linux Journal publisher Carlie Fairchild. She's right, and it's nice to know that Python's mindshare continues to increase.
Last year there were some fairly obscure rules about what constituted a programming language and a scripting language. This year the readers themselves decided, and Python also did quite well in the second category.
“In an industry conceived, created and driven by peers, an accolade from the community is the highest compliment you can get,” said Linux Journal publisher Carlie Fairchild. She's right, and it's nice to know that Python's mindshare continues to increase.
April 28, 2009
God Bless, Mum
You may remember that last year I entered (walked) the Race for Hope, a charity even in support of the attempt to find a cure for brain tumors. It was particularly appropriate as a family friend had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and we didn't at that time know what her prognosis was. Happily it looks as though she will survive, albeit with some attendant problems.
I am entering the walk again, but this year I will be making a personal contribution as I have another charity in mind for a more public appeal. Some readers may know that my mother died recently (on Saturday March 28, in fact, the middle day of PyCon). She'd been in failing health, so her death didn't come as a surprise, but if you'd been wondering why I wasn't my usual bubbly self at PyCon that was the reason why.
Rather than have people send flowers to the funeral the family decided we would look for a deserving charity, and ask people to make contributions to that instead. Mum was a midwife, with a healthy interest in the third world—she even took Urdu lessons at one point, and so the charity we chose was Safe Hands for Mothers. I hope that readers will support them through this page (for US donors the CAF link is easiest if you want to give money, just remember to click the "I don't live in the UK" button before entering your address).They are trying to help communities like those in sub-Saharan Africa, where mothers face a 1 in 16 chance of dying during pregnancy and childbirth.
Their web site doesn't have any way to record donations against a particular name, so I'd appreciate it if you would add a comment here should you decide to make a donation. We have so much in the way of material wealth in the United States and the rest of the Western world, and our gifts can make a huge difference to less fortunate individuals. Over 1,400 mothers die every day, many of them from avoidable complications. Please try and help them if you can. Thanks.
I am entering the walk again, but this year I will be making a personal contribution as I have another charity in mind for a more public appeal. Some readers may know that my mother died recently (on Saturday March 28, in fact, the middle day of PyCon). She'd been in failing health, so her death didn't come as a surprise, but if you'd been wondering why I wasn't my usual bubbly self at PyCon that was the reason why.
Rather than have people send flowers to the funeral the family decided we would look for a deserving charity, and ask people to make contributions to that instead. Mum was a midwife, with a healthy interest in the third world—she even took Urdu lessons at one point, and so the charity we chose was Safe Hands for Mothers. I hope that readers will support them through this page (for US donors the CAF link is easiest if you want to give money, just remember to click the "I don't live in the UK" button before entering your address).They are trying to help communities like those in sub-Saharan Africa, where mothers face a 1 in 16 chance of dying during pregnancy and childbirth.
Their web site doesn't have any way to record donations against a particular name, so I'd appreciate it if you would add a comment here should you decide to make a donation. We have so much in the way of material wealth in the United States and the rest of the Western world, and our gifts can make a huge difference to less fortunate individuals. Over 1,400 mothers die every day, many of them from avoidable complications. Please try and help them if you can. Thanks.
April 20, 2009
Sun to Become Part of Oracle
I'm not a great one for handing out stock tips, but when I said a month ago that Sun Microsystems was worth buying at $8 it looked like I was wrong when the IBM acquisition talks fell through. Just the same I held on, and now it looks like I'll be able to take a $1.50 profit when Oracle buy the company in the summer. Of course buying after the talks failed made even more sense, as Alex Martelli wisely pointed out in a comment. Thanks, Alex!
April 10, 2009
April 9, 2009
Django Dash
Fancy you and a buddy writing the spiffiest Django application of all in 48 hours? Sounds like a great way to spend the weekend. Well, geek, Django Dash might just be for you. Teams of three (or less, but this is supposed to be fun) compete to do just that.
April 6, 2009
WTF, StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a web service I use for occasional amusement - you register your "interests" and it shows you pseudo-random allegedly-related web pages. There's even a toolbar, which I was silly enough to install for those long evenings when there's nothing on the television and the clients aren't screaming loud enough to get my attention.
Unfortunately it just stopped being funny. I wanted to search my browser history for a specific page, and suddenly I see hundreds of entries, which I am absolutely sure are not a part of my browsing history (I would know if I had seen this page before), listed as "refer.php" whose content reads (typically) "One of our members added your page to the Humor topic on StumbleUpon." Here's a typical example.
So until I get an explanation telling me that either it's a Firefox bug (and we all know how rare those are) or StumbleUpon publicly grovel to get me back they are out, and the toolbar is history, and I won't be going back.
Unfortunately it just stopped being funny. I wanted to search my browser history for a specific page, and suddenly I see hundreds of entries, which I am absolutely sure are not a part of my browsing history (I would know if I had seen this page before), listed as "refer.php" whose content reads (typically) "One of our members added your page to the Humor topic on StumbleUpon." Here's a typical example.
So until I get an explanation telling me that either it's a Firefox bug (and we all know how rare those are) or StumbleUpon publicly grovel to get me back they are out, and the toolbar is history, and I won't be going back.
Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance
Talk about being a victim of your own success. Twitter has become my social networking tool of choice, but I wish the service were more reliable. It's just flaked for what seems like the tenth time in the last month, and now only displays the above message when you try and access it. You might regard that as the "this page intentionally left blank" of the web 2.0 world.
Of course the original design inevitably meant that the service is faced with scalability problems, but Twitter hasn't helped matters by providing tools for "weblebrities" like auto-follow (automatically following someone who follows you). Us regular no-hopers, of course, wonder exactly what the point is: if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter it's self evident that you couldn't give a bugger what any of them are tweeting, which makes the whole thing a rather vacuous exercise to those of us who prefer two-way communications to broadcasts.
I've actually been a member of the open source identi.ca site since OSCON, and while I think it's great that there's an alternative I haven't yet found it compelling enough to be more than an occasional visitor.
Like email spam it's becoming obvious that whenever a new phenomenon arises in the technical world, once it becomes public knowledge the traditional spoilers (marketdroids, celebrities and the like) will climb aboard and screw it up for everyone else. They just haven't realised yet that the rest of the world is just one short step away from telling them to get the hell out. There are a lot of dinosaurs walking around right now, wondering why they are feeling so warm.
Of course the original design inevitably meant that the service is faced with scalability problems, but Twitter hasn't helped matters by providing tools for "weblebrities" like auto-follow (automatically following someone who follows you). Us regular no-hopers, of course, wonder exactly what the point is: if you have 10,000+ followers on Twitter it's self evident that you couldn't give a bugger what any of them are tweeting, which makes the whole thing a rather vacuous exercise to those of us who prefer two-way communications to broadcasts.
I've actually been a member of the open source identi.ca site since OSCON, and while I think it's great that there's an alternative I haven't yet found it compelling enough to be more than an occasional visitor.
Like email spam it's becoming obvious that whenever a new phenomenon arises in the technical world, once it becomes public knowledge the traditional spoilers (marketdroids, celebrities and the like) will climb aboard and screw it up for everyone else. They just haven't realised yet that the rest of the world is just one short step away from telling them to get the hell out. There are a lot of dinosaurs walking around right now, wondering why they are feeling so warm.
April 2, 2009
PyCon Video: Even More Amazing!
I just learned from the PyCon Blog that all the video for the conference is expected to be available on-line at blip.tv by the end of Friday April 3, less than a week after the conference ended. This is indeed an awesome process, and the two videos already available via the PyCon web site shows that the quality problem that existed last year has been solved.
As I was one of the skeptics who thought we should maybe move to a professional video team I'd like to publicly take my hat off as chairman of the PSF to the dedicated team of volunteers under Carl Karsten who have made this possible.
Yet again I am compelled to say that PyCon rocks!
As I was one of the skeptics who thought we should maybe move to a professional video team I'd like to publicly take my hat off as chairman of the PSF to the dedicated team of volunteers under Carl Karsten who have made this possible.
Yet again I am compelled to say that PyCon rocks!
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