The Biscuit Appreciation Society - proud to be affiliated with the British Lard Marketing Board. Class.

There's rather an interesting thread going on over on c.l.py about private attributes and Python. It gave me the opportunity to post a link to one of my favourite c.l.py posts of all time, the Martellibot's wonderful essay decrying the "principle of least privilege". It should, as Steven D'Aprano says, be required reading for all developers, regardless of platform.

Also in the thread, the effbot comes to my defense on the subject of the rationale behind Python's name mangling feature, and links to a facinating thread from depths of Python's history in which the feature is originally discussed, and which contains this from Guido:"Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered". Poetry.

BTW, do any Java-heads out there know whether or not cglib allows you to bypass private and protected?

Mum's new baby is here. How's it going, Mum?

Err, yes, now that you ask, I may have had some infuence over her choice.

Colliers Wood's foremost Thursday night comedy club, Roar With Laughter, is back from Edinburgh. Well, actulally it was back two weeks ago, but I couldn't make it then. Anyway, Michael (the housewife's choice) and I will be there.

I see the US govornment are still nowhere being getting a clue. Of all the people to call as an expert on climate change, Michael Crichton? I ask you. Two class five sttorms in a month and NASA's clear warning will all be ignored in the face of testimony from the guy who created ER. I mean, he's made loads of money, so he must know what he's talking about, right?

My theory is that one day, the US will realise that all the extreme weather that they are getting isn't just a matter of chance, and the truth will finally dawn on them. Katrina and Rita can't be shown to have been caused by global warming, true, but as atmospheric average temperatures increase, there will be more and more storms. Americans are pretty good at getting stuff done once they pit their collective minds to something, so they'll slash emissions very fast. They'll also define large scale CO2 emission as "climatic terrorism", and bomb the living crap out of anyone doing it. Question is, will they realise in time?

Ha! Got the bastards!

On the whole, I'm rather worried that the new anti-terror laws will be abused. While I have little sympathy for the fuel protestors, I was horrified when the gfovornment suggested that anti-terror laws would be used agains them. Tunnel-visioned morons they might be, but terrorists? By no stretch of the imagination.

These so-called animal rights protestors, OTOH, certainly use violence to intimidate people, so I don't object to the new laws being used agains them.

Friday's Nerd Day went pretty well. Steve started the day knowing Java itself, but nothing else, and by the end of play we'd covered Ant (which we used to do all our building and deploying), Tomcat, Eclipse, Servlets, JSPs and JSTL, Postgres and JDBC, and we'd written code to display the contents of a database table on a web page. Not in a lot of detail, true, but still, that's a lot of ground for one day. Steve seems pleased, anyway.

Mark had touched most of this before, but not for a good while, so I hope it was valuable to him too.

Loads more to cover, though - I'd like to expand on what I've already covered, and put a bit more meat on the bones, and there's still Spring and Hibernate to look at. So, we'll be doing another day or two before too long. Still, both my victims test subjects pupils feel up to coming along to the next London Java meetup.

Plenty of things went wrong, mainly due to my general incompetance and lack of planning. In a funny kind of way, though, this was a good thing - it gave us a change to diagnois and fix the problems. Knowing where the logs are is often half the battle.

Right. I'm off to Haslemere to meet Steve to drink beer. Then, tomorrow is the long planned Nerd Day, during which I'll be showing Steve how to build a web application in Java. Mark will be coming down for it too; I gather that he's a bit sick of VB now.

I'm a rubbish trainer, so wish me (and them) luck. No need to worry about this evening, though; I'm good at drinking beer.

Err, well, actually, I've been right here. So, why no blogging? Thing is, I've been a bit busy, and the inclination to blog and the opportunity to blog don't seem to have coincided.

My good friend Jay has just been IMing me, nagging me about it. Given that he lives in Austin, Texas and has Hurricane Rita bearing down on him, he must consider a matter of import, so I'd better get on and post. Besides, El P is away this afternoon, so what's stopping me? (Other that the 600 arbitrary time units of work outstanding in the current Morph iteration, that is...).

So, what have I been up to? Well, the exciting news is that our new project, Project Morph, is finally under weigh in earnest, and we are going all agile. User stories, short(ish) iterations, YAGNI, SCRUMs, you name it. (Well, other than pair programming, that is. There are five of us, and two into five doesn't go...) I'll let you know how it goes, bit it's a bit early to tell...

What else? Oh yes, my presentation training the week before last. It wasn't half as bad as I thought it might be, and I certainly came out of it feeling better able to present to large groups that I did when I went in, but it's still well outside my comfort zone, and I'm going to need a lot of practice before I'm any good. Still, I'd like to give it a go. Any suggestions as to what I might present at Python UK 2006?

Roadkill is still a thing of beauty - I've not gone off it in any way. Command line stuff is really good once you are over some of the learning curve. There are a few Windows apps I miss, though - TortoiseSVN, SciTE, UltimateZip and Picasa for a start, and I miss Windows Explorer's right-button dragging. I'm not really sure that I have Python set up as I should, either. That's probably worth a post of its own. Oh, do check out Terminal Here.

What else? Oh yes, if you are in London, try and get along to either the Python meetup or the Java meetup next month. I'll be at both. See you there!

Anyway, I'm sure you'll all join me in wishing Jay the best of luck, and I'm off back to sprinting...

Last night's Java Meetup was great fun.

El Presidente was a little disappointed - he'd come along hoping to talk to some people about XP. (We are adopting it at work, bit by bit, and while we can all see the problems inherent in Big Design Up Front, we are also having difficulty working out how to do without it.) There are usually a few ThoughtWorkers around, but not this time, and no one else had any real XP experience. They'd all read the book, though. ;-)

It wasn't a total waste for him, though - He, Tulna and Darren formed a mini digital photography and Flickr sub-meetup. There were some good photos taken: (See here, if the permalink gets fixed, or find them from here otherwise. Darren also posted some of them to his blog, and set up a London Java Meetup Flickr group.) Darren had a particularly nice lens - even I managed to take a decent photo with it.

El P and Tulna were pleasantly surprised by the absence of wierdos, I think, but they both left fairly early.

Late in the evening I had a conversation about the lovely Spring framework with Rob Harrop and Rick Evans. This is most unusual - Jez has specified Spring as the topic of the month, and I never talk about Jez's topic.

Anyway, thanks to Jez for another good night. It would be rather churlish to blame him for my hangover, wouldn't it?

The big news from last night's Java Meetup is that Google is settting up a London office. It's to be focused on mobile devices, and new Google employee Ian Sharp was there to spread the news. They will be looking for people with Java skills, so have a go if you think you are hard enough.

I could get to like this bash thing. I have a fairly deeply nested directory tree. I wanted to delete all directories within that tree with a given name. (.svn, as it happens.) I was trying to use ls to generate a list of directories, but ls -R .svn wasn't giving me anything.

So, I joined the #bash channel on freenode, and was steered in the right direction in seconds - use the find command. Here's the end result, for my own reference as much as anything:

yes | find . -name '.svn' -exec rm -r {} \;

Beautiful, no? Well, OK, no, but it works.

Arrrgh! El Presidente got the dates wrong! My presentation skills training is this week! Arrrgh! Arrrgh!

I have to prepare a presentation in advance on a non-technical topic. Any suggestions?

I've not organised a London Python Meetup since April's, partly due to meetup.com's demise, partly due to my personal finances (I spent £100 last time!), but mostly due to pure sloth. Last night, though, at Sam's Django vs. Rails bash, considerable interest was shown in Python meetups.

So, Sam and I have decided to combine the two. On October the 10th, please come along to Smith's of Smithfield for nerdy chat about Python, Django, Rails, or anything at all really. Say, sixish 'till late.

Last night's Django vs. Rails thing was great fun. Funny thing - almost no one who came along had actually made use of either package. We were all there to hear from the experts, but there don't seem to be any of those just yet.

Well, except for Simon Willison, that is. Simon (1st page blogging for 'Simon', damn him!) is one of the three guys who built Django. Sadly, he hadn't brought a demo along either. :-( I did confirm that Django was named after the great Django Reinhart, though.

There were plenty of other interesting people around, some I knew already (Hi, Edward) and some I didn't (Hi, Torchbox people), and most of who's names I'd forgotten within seconds of having been being introduced. I'd blame the beer, but that would be lying, 'cos I'm always like that.

Tonight, to Jez's Java meetup with El Presidente and Tulna. Should be in interesting...

If you are coming along, do leave a comment...

Hey, you at the back. Yes, you. Stop smiling.

Gives you a real feeling as to how will this ID card biometrics thing is going to work, doesn't it? I can see it now: "Retinal Scanner: Please insert retina into the slot below to proceed."

(Note : Joke stolen from some Paranoia book or other circa 1985.)

Only on comp.lang.python would this post have recieved helpful responses. ;-)