It looks like Anthony has made it back to the US now. Sleep well, mate - you need it. ;-)

Meeting other bloggers after having read their blogs is a funny thing. Some are pretty much as you'd expect them to be. Andy Todd, for example, has the same gently self-deprecatory sense of humour as I would have expected, the same not-quite-smile while he's joking. Good techie, too. And Eloon, well, the only way she could have been more herself if she was wearing several pairs of shoes.

Anthony, though, wasn't at all what I was expecting. In his blog, he comes across as rather serious, very focused, and just a little irascible. In reality, though, he's a funny guy, who suffers fools (i.e. me) easily enough. He was just, well, warmer as a person than I'd expected. Nice chap.

I'll cover his presentation in a little detail later, but it was really good. His demo showing the automation of a simple Java app made my hair stand up on end. It was just so easy.

On, and in the subject of bloggers - this is a take off, right?

A very interesting article over at The Register - Al Jazeera and the Net - free speech, but don't say that. The Register are mainly a techie news outfit, but they are sometimes at their most interesting when they go off topic a bit.

It seems that Al Jazeera are finding themselves being blocked from Western audiences.

A couple of bits I'll quote verbatim: We should also clarify something regarding the footage of the prisoners and the dead servicemen; military spokesmen to the contrary, reproducing such images is not a breach of the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention is directed at governments, and does not cover news organisations. Al Jazeera has arguably broadcast images of the Iraqi Government breaching the Geneva Convention, but that is not the same thing.

To get this into perspective, note that one of the most striking pictures from the Vietnam war was of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner - do we argue that this should not have been published? If Al Jazeera had footage of an Iraqi shooting a British prisoner, should that be broadcast? The other way around? Are our standards today different from those of the 60s, or do the criteria differ depending on the nationalities of the participants and/or the audience? The answers are not straightforward, nor should they be.

It's not fair!

Eloon's got a cartoon, Charles Miller's got a cartoon, I want one!

Whoever invented the term “sleep like a baby” was not a parent. I feel your pain, Paul.

It's a wonderful thing when they start sleeping through. Mine still wake me horribly early in the morning, though. They are happy to leave thier mother to sleep, but if they are with me they have to wake me - they just can't resist. Saturday morning telly - I watch it all. Is that Fearne Cotton to young to fancy? But I digress...

My sister reckons that it's 'cos I'm too nice. She just tells them to piss off. If done with sufficient conviction, this works, I gather. I get all of my iracable rudeness out of my systems at work though - I just don't have any left for the kids.

Duncan Booth gave a presentation at Python UK 2003 on Patterns in Python.

Anyone not knowing what a software pattern is, and who is the slightest bit interested, should pay a visit to the Portland Pattern Repository.

It was a superb talk, mostly because of the audience participation, and Duncan's handling of that participation.

It was, in some ways, the audience from Hell. Sitting on the back row were Guido and Alex Martelli (AKA the martellibot). Elsewhere sat Anthony Eden and some other Java pattern-head whose name I didn't get. All of these people threw all manner of nasty questions, objections and counter-examples at Duncan, who reminded me of nothing so much as a first class batsman in dealing with them all.

He gave a few good examples: Singleton, Borg, Observer/Observed (or possibly Publish/Subscribe - one of the little debates kicked off over that one). He also presented on the Flyweight pattern. Well, everyone else seemed to understand him...

He also covered what he called 'Little patterns in Python', things like DSU (of which he gave a nice little example, BTW), and the use of list comprehensions. The question here was as to whether these things qualify as patterns. The general consensus was that these are actually idioms rather than patterns. Someone referred to them as 'textures', though, and I rather liked that - these sorts of things do seem to supply the texture to Python source code.