Older blog entries for mwh (starting at number 180)

22 Jan 2004 (updated 22 Jan 2004 at 17:02 UTC) »

I think I must have done something to annoy the software god recently. Nothing seem to be working right today.

This includes advogato.

hypatia: I think over-long introductions are too common at conferences too. Particularly at a multi-track conference, the audience have already chosen your talk over something else, so a ground-up justification of what you're doing is a bit over the top.

In other news, am trying to install a debug framework build of Python in such a way as to not interfere with my existing build. And failing, miserably.

I haven't used this advoposting script of mine in a while... I wonder what's broken :-) (astonishingly, it still seems to work)

There was an attempt to organize a PyPy-periphery interactive Python tools mini-sprint next week, which is sorta happening, though I can't leave Bristol so my participation is going to be virtual. Attempts to get VoIP working haven't really succeeded so it looks like this time it'll just be IRC.

After a pause that was just starting to be worrying, preparations for EuroPython 2004 are warming up. I'm all optimistic again :-)

I'm also going snowboarding the week after next. That should be cool.

I briefly considered setting up a blog on PyCS.net or something. And then I decided I couldn't be bothered. Maybe later.

ds: I hate you!

redi: I find lynx almost unusable, too, and prefer w3m (though links is ok). But I don't think I've said this recently :-)

zhaoway: Google suggests the term "real number" was coined to be the antonym of "imaginary number" (though I have my doubts). "Complex number" is due to Gauss, and if you mean "functional" as in "functional analysis" that must have been a frenchman... Google says Hadamard.

So, yes, English mathematics, like all the rest of the English language, could be said to have "agressively borrowed" the odd word here or there.

I suspect the people who wrote Jaguar's Mail.app didn't expect my 13K message python-dev folder. I hear Panther's version is better in this respect...

The hard drive in my machine died (fortunately with ample warning), so now I get the fun of setting up basically a new machine.

Boy do I hate doing this. Redhat 9 is significantly shinier than what I had before, though.

I seem to have written this during my iBook's time off the 'net:

There are many things to like about Cocoa. One is its glorious lack of minimality. I'm not sure I can really explain that remark. It could be the influence of the C++ performance/size obsession, but sometimes I get the feeling that OOP programmers strive for doing just the minimum.

Or, in XP terminology, "do the simplest thing that can possibly work".

I guess this segues into another thought: XP just doesn't apply for designing a resuable framework like Cocoa. You can't just merrily go on a refactoring spree through a framework (unless you want your users to shoot you when they upgrade). On the other hand, some of the XP maxims *do* apply: you shouldn't just add features without some use case. I guess the reason Cocoa is so comfortable is because the framework has matured while it was NextStep and there was an opportunity to throw lots of cruft out when it became Cocoa (dunno if that actually happened, but if it didn't there's an astonishing lack of historical crap in Cocoa).

Anyway, to contrive a free-software point, when looking for inspiration in framework design, look at Cocoa. Some of its features probably only really make sense in a somewhat dynamic language, so I don't know if (e.g.) Gnome could reach this level of flexibility and power (haven't looked at writing a Gnome app in a long time, admittedly).

Seem to be very busy at the moment. Having joined the uni climbing club is likely part of that. Monday and Tuesday each week are always very hectic at the moment.

Haven't found much time for hacking at all, which is partly a consequence of not having attached my iBook to the internet for some time. Haven't bought Panther yet -- wouldn't have had time to install it if I did -- but probably will fairly soon. NSController sounds interesting.

Bought a stack of Phillip Pullman books over the weekend, though. Seems a bit more interesting than that Potter rubbish :-)

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