Advogato: Blog for djm

Life: Life has been good. One week ago I finished a Masters degree (business) and the relief from responsibility is palpable. I have had time to read, watch videos, go out to the cinema and work a bit on the house. Lovely.
Python: I have just started playing with Python, after a couple of years of almost-but-not-quite motivation. It is quite a nice language which lends itself to a more disciplined mode of work than, say, perl. Unfortunately I suspect that it will take a while to get used to all its nuances and idioms. I expect that this will become my language of choice for short non-text-munching programs and especially for GUI tools. I expeted that the whole "whitespace as syntactic element" was going to annoy me no end, but I hardly noticed it at all.
PyGame: The reason I have started playing with Python. Wow. This library is really well structued and the whole of Python+SDL is much more than the sum of the parts. My stupid "blast the politician" game is fully functional with graphics, sound and joystick support in 250 lines of code. Still trying to figure out how much of the really cool sprite architecture works when using OpenGL though.
Silly Desktop: I am starting to get frustrated with Metacity; it has some really stupid behaviors and the developers seem more intent on pleasing mythical "real users" than people who submit bug reports backed up with patches. Worse, there is no obvious knob to turn to switch window managers to something less patriarchal.
softflowd: I posted the code to a relatively niche project of mine and was suprised to receive three sets of patches in the first week. More scary was that someone else has already built pretty much the same thing, right down to the commandline options. Theirs is a weird "GPL but you have to pay us first" licensing approach, so I don't feel like I have wasted my time.

5 Nov 2002 djm » (Master)