It's here! It's charging and updating as we speak.
10 million? Is that all? You lot just aren't trying! This kind of laxness woudn't have happened during Steve and my drinking days, I can tell you...
Bugger - The Kings of Leon CD, Youth & Young Manhood, won't bloody rip. Bastards. I paid for that fair and square, I did, and I'm not up to anything nefarious.
Double bugger - still no iPod. :-(
Still, plenty of ripping this morning:
Update: El Presidente has managed to rip Youth & Young Manhood using MusicMatch JukeBox, so I'll just grab his MP3s. Thanks, Paul!
I've been using iTunes today. I struggled with it briefly - I tried to get it to name and organise my MP3s the way I had been doing it. It wasn't having any of it. But in fact, the way iTunes wants to organise eveything is pretty nice, so I let it have its own way. It reorganised all my existing stuff for me, and all's well now.
Is this how Mac software is? You have to work its way, but if you do, everything gets organised for you? Sort of like being married...
It's not just my Mum who's getting all 21st century - my Aunt Kathy (or Great Aunt Kathy as I keep encouraging the girls to call her) has a web site up to publicise the Mersea Seafood Festival, which she's helping to organise.
You won't be seeing me there, though. I can't stand seafood - it smells like pants - and if you are willing to sample Mersea Vineyard wine, you are braver than I am.
That's two bloody nights in a row that I've been woken up by the rain at four in the morning. Waking in the middle of the night is no problem, but if I wake at four, that's it, I'm awake. Until five minutes before the alarm goes off, that is, naturally.
I'm knackered.
No sign of my iPod turning up today. Sigh. Still, I've been ripping CDs all morning - I brought in a big stack with me:
I'll do another pile like this tomorrow, so when it does turn up, I'll have plenty of stuff to get me started.
Neil Turner recommended dBpowerAMP Music Converter for doing the ripping. It works a treat - composing this post took far longer than doing the ripping did, discounting the churning-away-in-the-background time. But is there anything better? CDex any good?
Mum's just called to tell me that she's bought be an iPod for my combined birthday and Christmas present. Thanks, Mum!
How to win a small business award.
Another one for the wishlist.
Quantum Teleportation across the Danube Demonstrated.
Is it time for me to teleport down the pub yet? Sigh. No, not for a couple of hours yet. :-(
The bloody clients now want major changes to a report which it took me about a week to develop in the first place using The Tool from Hell; StyleReport Pro. Bastards. The changes are probably major enough that I'll need to start again from scratch.
Cool - Joe Celko’s writing for O'Reilly. Joe Celko is the SQL guru's SQL guru - and if you're not an SQL guru, you need to become one. Hierarchical SQL is a nice introduction to handling tree structures.
Somebody has to try the experiment.
Eclipse rocks - when it's awake. But using it on Windows, I've found that it has a tendency to drop off - if I've not used it for a while, or especially if I've minimised it, it often takes a good twenty or more seconds to start moving again, and even than it takes a long time before it starts to respond snappily.
The KeepResident Eclipse plug-in seems to fix this. It works for me, anyway.
"Windows has a tendency to preemptively swap Java processes out of physical memory, even when there is still plenty of physical memory available." Hmmm. You could almost think that this was deliberate, couldn't you? No, it's not possible - Microsoft would never behave in an underhanded fashion like that, would they.
Why I Fucking Hate Weblogs! I'm just posting a link to this so that El Presidente etcetera have a public forum for agreeing with every word of it.
Excellent interface! FileMatrix looks like one of Mark "The Burger Flipper" Matthews' efforts.
Well, provided, that is, that every time you click on something you get an couple of 'dialouges' saying stuff like "You've just clicked the 'Locate' button, OK to continue", and a couple of K in a log file.
In fact, we've just come up with an interface concept which might appeal to him - modal dialogues (sorry, dialouges) launched on mouse-over events. Can you do that in VB6?
(Via Simon Willison.)
On occasion, I may have drunk some things which weren't particularly good for me - but I've got nothing on this guy. Via Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants.
Bitter, disillusioned Dublin man, lately rejected by longtime fiancee, seeks decent, honest, reliable woman, if such a thing still exists in this cruel world of hatchet-faced bitches.
Personal ads in the Dublin News, via Mad musings of me.
We don't have boycott Penguin after all - they've backed down. Phew - that would have been nasty.
I had a nice little shopping trip on Saturday - £40 of Waterstones book tokens left over from my birthday. The branches near me are pretty crap, so I took a trip up to the lovely Piccadilly branch. All three volumes of Simon Schama's History of Britain, and Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of the Primes. That'll keep me busy.
There are a couple of techie things on my wishlist, but I had to promise not to spend the tokens on anything work related.
One of the things that we've been up to in the last week is looking into some sort of group collaboration software. It seems that it's only a bad idea if it's my suggestion. ;-)
We looked a a whole bunch of tools. Plone looked like superb software for doing loads of publishing style things that we don't really want to do, but it was way over the top for us. SquishDot was another tool we looked at. Again, very nice, but it's not so much discussions and announcements that we want it host as it is a repository for all the how-tos that we always sent around by email. And lose. Tracey seemed rather keen on SharePoint, but it seemed rather too structured to the rest of us. Besides, that Microsoft lock in is a bitch.
In the end, we've gone for a Wiki. We are using the MoinMoin engine - it's one of the most mature, it does everything we need, and it looks good. At least, some of the themes do. ;-)
We are unlikely to be exposing it to the outside world, though, I'm afraid.
Now, the main question seems to be what to call it. ElPresidente, sorry, El Presidente seems to be rather keen on "Skippy".
The Python Paradox: "I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire."
There are, of course, many very very bright Java programmers out there. But there are also a huge number of "I learnt it 'cos my company made me, only in it for the money" types using Java. Burger flippers don't only use VB! Whereas Python programmers are on average of an enormously high standard indeed. (After all, even I can't drag the average down that far; I'm only one man.)
It's been quiet around here. I was on holiday the week before last, and I was run of my feet last week. Still am, in fact, but my collection of links on del.icio.us is getting too big to ignore...
(BTW, check out my mum's my mum's del.icio.us. I introduced her to Firefox and del.icio.us when I was up there on holiday, and now she's hooked.)
Python-land seems to have descended into chaos while I've been away. I suppose I'd better leave someone in charge next time I go on holiday. ;-)
The source of the problem is function decoration, which offers a way to mutate a function or method. The cardinal example of a function decorator might be staticmethod(), Python's way of building static methods. Currently, you have to declare and code the function, then call staticmethod() passing your function as an argument:
class MyClass:
def my_method(arg1, arg2, ...):
whatever
my_method = staticmethod(my_method)
This is bad for two reasons; firstly, the code which defines my_method as static is not in the same place as the definition of the function itself - it may be a long way away in the case of long methods, and secondly there's the non-critical but irritating fact that you need to enter the method's name three times, violating the DRY principal.
Enter function decorators. The current implementation spells decoration like this:
class MyClass:
@staticmethod
def my_method(arg1, arg2, ...):
whatever
Now, I dislike this for two reasons. Firstly, it's ugly. This matters. Secondly, it's not in the function - it doesn't really look like part of it. I'm not alone in disliking this syntax.
I prefer Phillip J. Eby's list-after-def proposal:
class MyClass:
def my_method(arg1, arg2, ...) [staticmethod]:
whatever
Much nicer, at least in simple cases. Things get more complicated where you have multiple decorators, and/or the decorators take arguments themselves, but I don't believe that these will come up too often - especially not the second.
Anyway, that's enough from me; this discussion has generated over six hundred emails to python-dev over the last week, and I don't have anything new to add. I'm sure that whatever Guido ends up deciding on, it'll be OK in the end. He knows what he's doing.
I've not even started reading last week's c.l.py. ;-)
I went out on the lash with Rachel, my sister and my mum.
It certainly wasn't like drinking with blokes, I must say. It took my sister five minutes to decide which wine she wanted; I'd usually have been on the second round by the time we actually ordered. Then, we sat down and had a conversation about curtains.
Congratulations to my ex Cath, and to Dan, her husband - they had a healthy baby boy at six this morning.
They had been told that it was a girl, so they have a pink bedroom and lots of little dresses. But Dan at least will be over the moon anyway - he was desperate for a boy to take to Highgate. Cath'll be pleased too, 'cos he won't be nagging her her for anther baby now!
Freja is deligted. Ella's got mixed feelings - she isn't the baby any more, and besides, she wanted a little sister. Still, I know she'll warm to the idea when she sees her new little brother. Which won't be until the weekend, 'cos we are in Newcastle for the rest of the week.
Update: The baby was 3 kilos (6 pounds 10 ounces in old money), born after a one hour labour, and is called Reuben. (Or is that Ruben?) Cath and Reuben ar now at home, and both are well.
Well, up north, at any rate.
We all went up to Whitehouse Farm yesterday. I really can't recommend it enough. Large animals to feed, as much handling of small animls as you can, um, handle, tractor rides, a picnic, a big slide, it's all a small girl could ask for. Or four small girls, in our case. Photos to follow. Lots of photos. I've got my SLR back from my ex, so I've been getting to know it again. Fun!
We went to Grossology today at the Life Center. Nice, if small. I suppose that I'm spoiled by havng all the London museums on my doorstep - especially the wonderful Science Museum.
I had a night out on the tiles with Mark last night. Classy place, Newcastle; Kiss was holding an amateur pole-dancing night. Nice.