Older blog entries for moshez (starting at number 23)

Today, for the first time in my life, I met a client. It was fun. Well, on the bus to Tel-Aviv I met a friend of mine from the army, and we spent the ride talking. He told me some army horror stories. Scary! Well, then I manage to get to the client. I installed some software, configured it a bit, and after ~7 hours, I left. Then I remebered why I hate Tel-Aviv: you can never find a bus station. Oh, well.

Yesterday Stav and I went downtown to drink and talk. We had lots of fun -- I taught him what Guiness untabbed is (strong and good), I drank Fuzzy navel. The barwoman at Mike's Place is simple way, and I mean *way* cute. It was fun just listening to the band, looking at her, and trying to reinvent Linux with Stav. There were two cute girls in a table next to us. When one of them went <some place> the other started to offer her pizza to everyone there. Fun fun. Well, the one who constantly left looked really good, so when Stav and I decided to leave, I left a note on her jacket asking her to call me. I then found her outside and told her I left a note on her jacket. Well, so far, no call. Oh, well. Anyway, then we decided we want to go some place else with food, so we went to Riff Raff. There we talked about reconstructing technology, including settling in place. Then we talked some more, and went to the Cave pub. There the waitress was not cute at all, but the drinks were all right. We drank a bit, talked some more, and staggered to a taxi home. Today I woke up with the predictable headache, and got a clean slate on my mail. MUTT rulez! And I'm logged in to #debian for the first time. Loads of fun!

Yesterday night Ira invited me over to see "First Strike", a Jacky Chan movie. It was my first Jacky Chan, but Ira kept complaining that they have too much pseudo-plot and too little fights. What fights were in the movie were simply great. Then we saw "Nikita -- The TV Series" or something like that. It's really got no connection to the original movie, but was cute nonetheless. Then we saw some Michael J. Fox movie about ghosts...funny, like a parody of "Sixth Sense", only it was before it.

Yesterday was also the day I finally finished Stav's books -- all eight of them, which meant that I can do more then one book/day. Perhaps I'll finish the Amber decalogy before my trip to Amsterdam. (Or perhaps I'll do the finish up on the plane -- always something good to do on flights).

Yesterday was a lot of fun. Ira, Stav and I went to Abu-Gosh to eat some humus and then baqlava. We met with Eitan there and had lots of fun. Then we came back to my place, and talked a lot until my family decided to go out to dinner -- so I shooed Adi and Ira away, and went to eat. We went to "Anashim" in Ein-Karem, and I had a sushi platter. Good for the soul...

Now that it's the promgrenade season, we have lots of ripe promgrenades. I spent all morning peeling them, with the necessary periodic sampling. Now we have >3kg of peeled promgrenades waiting for me. It sounds like a lot, but you can easily kill a kg of promgrenade while talking to someone. Luckily, I'm peeling them faster then they are being eaten -- for the moment.

To all dedicated readers of my journal: I'm sorry. I'll try to be more consistent in the future.

This has been quite a week: my first non-working week. The only slight problem was that on last Thursday, my radiator gave up the ghost. That means that until today I was car-less. Well, being a) carless and b) with a lot of Stav's books I mostly stayed at home and read. I've read quite a number of books, and I'm enjoying it. Of course, I've also graced the internet quite a lot. It's fun. Today was a very exciting day: my father and I started planning our vacation to the Netherlands. And, what's more, I finally got my car back. I missed my great big white Audi. Wuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What fun to me!!!! Oh, and I also had to go to Proficieny (my old company) to sign some papers and get my last paycheck. I can't believe I won't see the place anymore.

Well, since I haven't put in entries in quite a while, I'll recap a bit. Alex and Debi are now in the US, and I probably won't be joining them since I don't want to go to Cornell. Ira is finally back from abroad, but I haven't managed to see him yet. Probably this weekend. I've met with Chen, and we had a lot of fun, and I'm finally over her. It was action packed three years which I can now put behind me and be friends with Chen. There were times when I wouldn't have realized it possible.

Last night I had a great Step Aerobics lesson. The regular teacher was sick, and an apparently much more popular teacher substituted. It was hard! It was very fast-paced, which made it difficult both technically and physically. I got out half dead. Linux-il is trying to design a dinner, and it seems I won't be there, since I don't want to pay taxes to the "Rabbanut", and they're insisting on a kosher place. Bummer. I got the LJ yesterday, and started reading it. Nice articles, though some of them are really for novices. Reuven's article was nice, though I haven't began reading it seriously. I did notice a slight error (cnn.com should be .cnn.com, otherwise the cookie wouldn't be sent to www.cnn.com). On a similar streak, a server-side Cookie module is finally making it's way into Python. AMK has finally gone over my docos for Cookie, so I'm feeling safer. I should figure out how to document that __repr__ is the same as .output() -- I'm starting to think the whole Python documentation mechanism should be *really* built from the ground up. JavaDoc never had some problems, because there's no overloading in Java. Hmmmmmmm............

Well, finally I got of my butt and wrote another entry. So much has changed since the last diary entry, it's simply amazing. For one thing, I've quit my job -- I'm going to work for Lerner doing web development. Finally, some hope of using Python is in my future, in a company that is actively for me being on the Python development team. It should be loads of fun to work. Of course, just meeting Reuven was a draining experience -- my car died a day before, and we had to make several trips to the idiots at the car shop before they managed to fix my car via brute force. Well, finally people who are worse at what they do then programmers. Oh, well. Now I'm happily learning database stuff, which is really cool. Though I still believe object databases are the future <wink>. I'm going out a lot these days with both Alex and Debbi, and Ira and Stav, usually not at the same time. For Alex's birthday, I brought Stav, and just like I predicted, Debbi and him got along really well. (Well, all it takes to get along with Debbi is to say good things about Macs, which he did...). Last night there was a cool late Too Be'av (the Jewish love-day or something) party in Sataf. Loads of fun -- lots of people from where I served in the military, lots of people from hi-tech company. It took a concious effort not to talk about computers, but I guess I managed well in the face of temptation. I met lots of people I haven't seen for a while, like Vadik and Yuval Aharoni, laughed a bit at people still doing military service and had lots of fun. It's nice to see that old military rivalries never die -- you explain to people that where you served you made fun of where they serve semi-professionally. (To those who understand, the word "niggers" comes to mind). I met this really cute girl called Michal, and we ended up talking half the night about everything. I even managed to get a phone number from her, which made me really happy. Well, perhaps I am over Chen already. Which reminds me, IGLU is starting to form a non-profit, which is cool. The coolest thing is that the organizational commitee is called "The IGLU Cabal". That seems like a good time to tell the true story about the IGLU cabal. One day, Stav, Ira and myself were in Ira's house talking, when I suddenly said "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a rumour about an IGLU cabal, and everyone kept denying it? Probably merely denying it vehemently enough would make people sure it exists." Well, the decision was that come morning, I'll spoof an e-mail asking "What is the IGLU cabal?", and all of us will repsond with "There is no IGLU cabal", and put it in our signatures. To anyone doubting the story, check the mail headers -- Yaron Cohen was from "prof-sol-....netvision.net.il", which is "Proficiency Solutions" (the old name of my company) and netvision is the ISP.). Well, it went off really well, and apparently denying it vehemently enough actually created it -- which proves reality imitates the imagination. Well, all in all the last days were a hectic jumble of fun and extreme emotions, but now I'm happy.

Wow, today was a blast (a hard one, though). I got up at 6:30 am to clear my car out -- I actually thought I was driving 4 people *execpt* myself. Scary. Anyway, my dad even helped me check for oil and water (it's 30 degrees celsius outside -- you need water) Stav called to say he missed Alex Schintman (sp?) and is coming over by taxi. I told him no problem -- I'll wait for him. 5 minutes later I get a call from Alex, saying he waited for Stav, and to wait for them. Well, of course we got out only at 8:15. I'm getting out of mevasseret, into the highway, when Stav suddenly remembers, he forgot his back, and his not coming back to Jerusalem. Well, what could I do? Turned at Abu Gosh, back to my house, picks the bag from Alex's car, and we continue. It's 8:30 already, and I really want to be there. Well, step on the gas! Driving in my usual fast-though-careful-and-polite way, I got there within an hour. Well, alls well that ends well, I guess. In there, there was a hillariously funny seremony where CompaQ gave IGLU the server (should be in place by monday), and then Moshe Bar's talk started. An amazing guy -- he knows *so* *much*. I was impressed -- he doesn't write in LJ for nothing. Well, it was a very enlightening talk. During the coffee break, I swapped C++ war stories with a programmer at Epitera. Fun. After the break, he tried to get Israeli companies on the Open Source bandwagon. I'm for it -- it'll make Israel a better place for Open Source freaks like me. We swapped stories about how it is to be a Moshe in the Free Software world -- our name marks us for life -- not like the Gregs and Alexs of the world. Fun, fun. Later, I built a well-off (as opposed to rich) Python interpreter -- and found a bug in the test suite for linuxaudiodev -- it complained about bugs if the user has no permission to access the SB, or if there is simply no SB. I checked in a fix to make it ignore the warning in an ugly way. Thomas W fixed regrtest.py, and I checked in a correction. (Of course, I had to go and mix tabs and spaces, and later fix that. A day just isn't worth it if I don't prove to python-dev I'm an idiot <wink>.). Well, then I started compiling the Python interpreter with -Wall -Werror (well, what's life without knowing your inner anal retentive). Made some fixes in that area too. SF CVS caused some problems along the way. I shouldn't complain, really, the SF guys are nothing short of amazing. Then, I decided to check out "screen". Boy -- this is my dreams coming through -- everything VCs were meant to be and more. And copy-and-paste with the keyboard only simply bought me. I'll bow and pray to the guy who wrote screen, and it's even free. Well, vrms doesn't complain -- which is good enough for me.
If it was good enough fro Stallman....
Oh, and I talked to Debi and Alex (the real Alex -- Alex U) on the phone, since Alex had to go and drive to KG. Bummer. Well, it's his mother's birthday, and all. Wuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!! What fun to me!!!!!!!! I talked to Debi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last night I met with Debi, now that Alex is away. I'm so cruel...I was supposed to teach her Python, but she was a bit tired. So I just showed her what's WikiWikiWeb is all about and maybe she can use that. Then I showed her Jeffrey Elkner's and myself's book. Then we just talked about all kinds of things. I didn't really want to say goodbye, so we ended up saying goodbye for a long time. This morning I finally had time to close the bug I fixed in Python, which was loads of fun.

I also managed to get PEPs for docstring format and hooking the p in repl assigned to me. Hopefully, I'll be able to put in some work on them this evening. I've already downloaded my heat-generating proposal from last time, and I think I sort of know what to fix:

  • "Display" markup should be very light-weight -- nothing more then b[text in bold], i[text in italics], and p[code], etc. (The good thing about using [], is that since most code has balanced [], you won't need to explicitly escape anything most of the time.
  • "Semantic" markup should enable reference to the surrounding program: an unadorned [] around something that matches the "name" production should produce a reference to whatever it is: it should see if it is defined as a function/class, if it is a class variable, if it is given as an argument to a surrounding function, if it is a module (the filename minus the .py or something that is in "import foo" or "from foo import ...".)
  • A consecutive number of lines starting with >>> or ... should be marked up as an example.
  • If there is the pattern "example::\n\n<increase in indentation>" everything until a corresponding dedent is marked up as an example too.

Well, as it will shortly be explained, yesterday I could not post a diary entry. However, today I can, thanks to Adi's undying efforts. (Thanks, man!) Adi came to visit me, and helped me get my computer up and running. Now it is working fine, with all the frills, and I can finally contribute to Python comfortably. Adi and I played with the computer until 21:00, and then I drove him home. Then I began the long ride to Herzelia (45 minutes legally, 30 minutes my way). I got to Gidi's birthday party a bit late, but had loads of fun. I met all the guys from the military, and we swapped experiences, starting with the common question "Which start-up do you work for?" (except, of course, the people still in the army....) Lots of cute girls too, so there was even a lovely scenery. Then I got back home, resynced with the Python CVS tree and went to sleep. Later today I got up and checked in my long waited patches. The effbot didn't like one of them, and decided to say so only *after* I checked it in. I still think it's good -- we'll see.

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