Entries classified under weblog created during Jan 2005

Simon points to Raghda zaid's blog, which has invoked a weird sort of uncontrollable sad rage I can't shake.

Kid 0.5 is available and I think I finally like it enough to start dumping out some example templates and API usage...

Video on the web is complete shit. Here's an email I sent to my mom today:

Okay, go here:

http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2663486

Look for something in the middle of the screen that says "200k" and hit that. They'll ask you for a format preference or something. Pick "Windows Media" if it's an option. If not, pick "Real Media". A bunch of other crap will pop up - just close those. But try not to close the video window because it will look like an advert when you first see it.

She will never, ever see that video.

Web Antipatterns strikes again!

This is the second article following up Phillip J. Eby's Python Is Not Java. In the first article, The Static Method Thing, we took a look at how Java static methods differ from Python class/static methods. This time we're going to dive deep into the evils of getters and setters.

I have a theory that I believe proves it is impossible to travel backward in time. The theory is based purely in practicality and requires no mathematical or physical calculation whatsoever (although I throw a bit of bullshit math in for good measure).

It should be noted that I have no understanding of formal time travel theory or even basic physics so this is surely full of holes. Still, it has been fun to ponder and so I feel an urge to record it here.

If you've heard of this particular theory, please let me know as I've done some research (okay, only a little googling) and have come up with nothing.

Joshua has been toying with a new posting interface for del.icio.us. It is based on nutr.itio.us, the nice third party posting interface that has been MIA for a while. The new interface provides your tag list, a list of popular tags for the page you're bookmarking, your full tag list, and some popular tags in general. It isn't finished yet but it's an improvement over the current no-frills posting interface.

UPDATE: Make sure you understand that this is not finished yet and could flake out on you at any time as Joshua is enhancing it. Also, you have to scroll down a bit to see the new bits of functionality.

ANOTHER UPDATE: By popular request, a Big Thing has been added that makes more of the new posting interface visible without scrolling.

You can get a Thing for the new interface by entering your username below. After generating the Thing, drag it to your bookmarks bar. I've tested this on Firefox 1.0 and Safari.

I had a very small number of complaints related to basing Kid on ElementTree. This came in two forms:

1. SAX and DOM are “standard” and while ElementTree is a drastically improved system for processing XML in Python, it doesn't matter because everyone already knows SAX/DOM.

2. “libxml2 is teh rawk!”

First, if Python's W3C DOM standard based xml.dom package were a movie, it would be called Elf, staring xml.dom. It's the episode of Little House on the Prairie where Alien asks Michael Landon for permission to marry his daughter. It does not belong here!

Next, in terms of pythonicness, libxml2 is almost worse than xml.dom but you at least get something for it: they don't even have a word to describe this level of “fast” and it comes along with XPath, RelaxNG, XSD, XML-Base, XInclude, and XSLT. My issue with libxml2 is just that it's a bad dependency for a project like Kid that wants to be able to run on cheap web space with bare-bones Python support. There are a lot of hosting providers that aren't going to have libxml2 or the option of compiling from source.

I went with ElementTree because it's simple, pythonic, and fast enough. I also had a feeling we'd be seeing more development around ElementTree, which brings us nicely to why I'm posting.

I completely forgot to mention what is quite possibly the most important event to date in Kid history: the first real application to incorporate Kid templating is Ross Burton's sexy Tate (I said, “sexy Tate,” not “sexy Taint!”). It's an elegant, RDF / XHTML photo gallery that I'm dying to get my hands on. If you're into nice semantic usage of (X)HTML, make sure to peep the page source and check out the correct usage of <ul>’s and whatnot.

Ross has reported a few issues and even mentioned plans for packaging Kid for Debian. He's the proprietor of the excellent Sound Juicer CD ripper for GNOME 2, Debian contributor, and takes some kick-ass photos to boot.

Heard today on lwn.net:

... knowledge is exactly like power - something to be distributed as widely as humanly possible, for the betterment of all. -- jd

Word!

Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning was the Command Line was recently put online (legally and with permission from Stephenson, of course). I've always heard this was a must read for anyone with even a mild interest in the history of the computer industry. My vertical scrollbar is at about 37% and already I have to agree.

This alone will be worth the read (and it doesn't even have anything to do with computing):

I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.

And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.

I fell in love with Stephenson's writing style with Snowcrash. The day after I finished Snowcrash, I purchased Cryptonomicon - in hardcover. I have not yet found the time to take on the Baroque trilogy.

Oh yea. There are some mixed feelings about the copy of Command Line linked to. The guy who got Stephenson's okay to put it online felt it necessary to annotate some bits that were slightly out of date. I read the first couple of annotations, couldn't really follow, and skipped the rest. They aren't overly intrusive and might even make sense to a different monkey.