The Big Day Out was crowded, tiring but lots of fun, Rammstein stole the show as expected with their fiery and very very camp performance. I am convinced that Rammstein are the noughties equivalent of 80s stadium rock. The highlight was running into Byron of SYL, who was wandering around scoping out the crowds for their upcoming Australia tour in April. I honestly felt like a giddy teenaged groupie for a moment, but we ended up having a good chat.

Real-life TODO list is becoming smaller, which allowed me to create a first run of my as-yet-unamed-cbb-like-PyQt-application. It works pretty well but it's not spectacular - it does everything that cbb does except the graphs, but it's going to need to be far more snazzy before anyone is going to download it.

It has proven a point though - writing it was extremely easy, especially considering I'm not exactly a python expert. The code is legible and required almost no debugging during development (past my learning bits and pieces as I went along). Additionally I have something for my little show-and-tell at the Programmers SIG next month.

The most striking side-effect of using a non-native GUI toolkit with Python is that python doesn't appear to recognize the ownership of Qt objects created in python code, by other Qt objects. For example, if you create a set of QListViewItems and populate a QTableView with them, you need to maintain a reference to them in python or they will be GCed at the first opportunity. The fact that the QTableView maintains references to the items internally is understandably overlooked. It was an annoying artifact to locate but easy enough to work around once writing code. I guess it should be mentioned in the PyQt docs.

Starting a new project at work from next week. Got a few days to wrap up my current project and pass on the reins to some poor maintenance sod. Life is vaguely satisfactory.