Entries classified under weblog created during 2004

It is perhaps slightly amusing that writing 30 lines of code in Emacs and resizing the Emacs window under OS X requires an equivalent amount of time.

Really Hard is the official classification applied to problems encountered in software design that are non-technical. That is, when offered a choice between the most complex technical problem and the simplest non-technical problem, the average hacker will choose the technical problem.

Seth lost his mind over the weekend and gave me commit access to yum cvs.

A co-worker asked how global/class variable scoping worked in python today. Specifically, how to access globals/class variables from within a class method. I told him what I knew (global keyword.. yadda yadda.. self.. yadda yadda..) and he was satisfied. Then he asked, "where did you read that?" I thought for a second and realized that I had not really ever read much formal documentation on variable scoping and that I must have picked most of what I knew up from looking at code or just playing around. “What do you mean “playing around”?” he wants to know. “Well,” I said, “I just try different stuff and see what happens.” It occured to me that Python is excessively easy to pick up as you go because it is easy to try things quickly, measure results, and draw conclussions. Some people call this “The Scientific Method”. The conversation ended shortly after but I didn't get the feeling he took me seriously on the trial and error thing. Do most programmers feel that formal documentation is a requirement for learning? I sure don't. I'm positive I learn as much, if not more, scientifically than I do reading documentation. My python-fanboy column for today will thus be on how python lends itself well to those that prefer to learn scientifically.

I need to make some decisions with what to do with Schwag. There are two real directions and I just cannot decide which I want to take. Part of me thinks I should keep it real simple and make it a planet.gnome.org like aggregator that would be used as generation tool for multi-user / public sites. The other half of me really wants to develop this personal portal thing. This goes more in the direction of a single-user, desktop aggregator/reader that has really strong aggregating and reading facilities as well as the ability to act as a bookmark manager type thing.