Planet London Python

I just finished reading Ivan Krstic's excellent Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi blog post. It appears that Negroponte would now like the OLPC XO to become yet another laptop we have to throw Windows off before we install some open source operating system supporting the GNU toolset.

I don't believe Nicholas Negroponte could manage to find his way out of a paper bag, let alone manage a hardware supplier trusted to build the infrastructure of developing countries. His Windows bait-and-switch makes him look like a shill for Microsoft. I wonder how much Microsoft stock he holds?

He just doesn't get that he has blown a huge chance to make a difference here. The thing that pisses me is the way he has played fast and loose with the work of literally hundreds of open source programmers who have attempted to support what they saw as a worthwhile educational project. But now Negroponte says that OLPC isn't an educational project after all. It's not about you. Nick, it's about the kids in the developing economies.

• Firebug Command Line API
• Bus Stop Knobs
  Via del.icio.us/qwghlm
• The Fermi Paradox revisited
• Homeland Security: Delta Green for the new millennium
• Licensed to launch guardian.co.uk
  See what I did there? ;-)
• Mail Unread Menu 3.1

As promised at the end of my talk, I just uploaded my slides and sample code from PyCon Italia. Included are the S5 slides, a simple Resolver One sample, the IronPython shell example and code for the demo program, mp3stats.

Thanks to Michael Foord for the basis of much of the slide content.

• Yes, Carl Icahn *should* bid for McDonalds, just for that headline
  “Icahn has cheezburger?”
• Gluttons for punishment
  "love them or hate them, puns aren't going to disappear any time soon"
• The Build Doctor: Unclean. (does your CI server have an IDE installed on it?)
  "Your build shouldn't depend on an IDE." +sys.maxint from me.

Inspired by Google's way of working I today put together a little script in Python for splitting a search. The idea is that you can search by entering certain keywords followed by a colon like this:

And this will be converted into two parts:

You can configure which keywords should be recognized and to make things simple, you can basically set this to be the columns you have to do advanced search on in your application. For example (from_date,to_date)

Feel free to download and use it as much as you like. You might not agree completely with it's purpose and design so you're allowed to change it as you please.

Here's how to use it:

• Session variables without cookies
  "Brilliant but terrifying hack—you can store up to 2 MB of data in window.name and it persists between multiple pages, even across domains." Jesus H. Christ on a bike.
• Google Doctype - Google Code
  "Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more."
• Day With No News

• Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back
• Three generations of bloggers
• Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery
• Flickr Export Plugin for Acorn
• tinydb.org
  store some tiny data in a tiny url
• International "Lotus Notes Hater Day" day: May 13, 2008

I *should* be searching out and evaluating Python geometry libraries. But I keep getting these niggling impulses to start hammering out my own vector, polygon and quaternion classes. Possibly in C. Ohdear.

Why is it so much easier, or at least so much more appealing, to start beavering away on your own code, rather than to take the sensible approach of evaluating existing libraries? A couple of hours searching could save you days, weeks or months of work, and libraries written and used by several people will undoubtedly be of higher quality as well - it should be a no-brainer.

It’s easy enough to conjure up subjective justifications for it on a personal level, but to my mind they rarely hold up to scrutiny. Reading and understanding other people’s code is said to be harder than churning out some according to your own vision, but surely the depth of understanding required to use a module should surely be substantially less than it would take to write it? Likewise, curiosity, obsessiveness, a sense of personal achievement play a part, but these motives are deeply subjective, and cannot be used to argue the case that ‘rolling your own’ is an efficient or rational decision, merely an enjoyable (or compulsive) one. Expectations of quality also contribute - everyone thinks that their own code is better. But this is rarely really the case, and experienced practitioners recognise it.

On a deeper level, then, why does some part of us allow these inadequate justifications to hold sway? Even if rationally, we know it doesn’t make sense, why does it feel so desirable? What I’m really asking is, why have we been evolved to want to build our own, even though it is so clearly the wrong thing to do?

What if we are tuned, as individuals, to prematurely settle on our own idiosyncratic approach? The net result would be that, for any given problem, a flurry of individuals would each set out in different directions, regardless of what results others might have already achieved. Viewed as a group activity, this starts to sound a little saner. Such a dispersion of individuals would rapidly and thoroughly explore all the corners of the problem space. Compared to the situation where we all just build cumulatively on what everyone else has done before, the chances of any one individual finding an optimal answer is low, but the chances of someone in the group finding it is greatly increased.

It’s a survival-of-the-group trait, that each of us is evolved to pick a wrong-looking answer, and then expend ourselves beavering away to prove it. Oh dear indeed.

• A Welsh Born Icon: GTA IV
  "What a changed world we live in when the Torygraph publishes cheats for it."
• Python with a modular IDE (Vim)
  "I’d use these if I wasn’t still scarred from the time vim encrypted my file instead of saving it because I had caps lock on by mistake." LOL!
• tms
  Command line interface to Time Mchine. Fucking awesome.
• A vision in denim?
  I love Hadley, me.
• Pharyngula: True monsters
  In case anyone thinks we atheists don't believe in evil...

I'm enjoying the wonderful weather in Florence this weekend while attending PyCon Italy 2. Yesterday's highlight was Richard Stallman's thought-provoking keynote titled Free Software in ethics and in practice held in the jaw-dropping Palazzo Vecchio. Stallman's alter-ego Saint IGNUcious (of the church of Emacs) even made an appearance.

My presentation on Sunday covers Application Development in IronPython. It's mainly an introduction to IronPython for Python programmers. Being very much an an Italian language conference, there's real-time translation of English presentations to Italian (mine included). Conversely there's translation from Italian to English in one stream.

The conferences organisers and attendees are being patient with my lack of Italian language skills. I feel very lucky that many Italians can speak English. It's easy to be complacent about learning other languages when you already know English.

I've been fortunate to have met some great people including Raymond Hettinger (core Python team), Arkadiusz Wahlig (Skype4Py) and some of the organisers Simone, Giovanni and Lawrence. It's always great to be able talk shop, exchange perspectives and be inspired. (Resolver One has been getting plugged too!) I'm looking forward to more conversations as the conference continues. The best stuff at conferences always happens outside of the lecture theatres.

ps. The food rocks! The conference lunch today was amazing and last night's Florentine style steak was super-tasty.