Older blog entries for moshez (starting at number 12)

Last night was particularily interesting -- just went to sleep early. However, this morning I found out two patches have been assigned to me. Oooopssss. Well, I'm not sure why Guido assigned my the eptags patch, so I'm not doing anything until he clarifies that. In any case, I rewrote eptags to use tokenize -- parsing with plain re is just plain hard. I'm supposed to just commit the goddamned SimpleHTTPServer patch. Friday Adi visits me and fixes my modem, and that's it. One way or another, I'm going to connect the damn machine to the net.

Oh, last night Alex came back from reserves, and there was much joy, especially after I surrendered all my beliefs so Debi will let me speak to him. Fun. Then I talked to Debi for a bit, and told her I miss her. Wuuuuuu!!!!!!! I miss a Debi!!!!! I miss a horizontal Debi!!!!!!! I miss a vertical Debi!!!!!!!!. She said she was insulted that I didn't mention it in my diary, so maybe this will fix it.

Today was good: ESR liked my Product patch (and try to make it into something it isn't). Fredrik Lundh decided he liked my unicode-8 bit comparison suggestion the best. Wow, do I feel flattered.

List comprehensions won't make it into 2.0, which is probably a good thing. Now all that is left is to postpone augmented assignments. Guido relieved me of some of my worries about them, but I still had a bad feeling about them. 2.0 Python will be cool, though -- unicode, GC and __contains__, oh my!

This morning I had a wonderful workout at the company gym. I worked a bit on the training bicycle, then a bit on the walker. Then I felt half-dead but didn't feel like stopping so I took the Step from its hideaway and gave myself a Step Aerobics lesson. It was fun, but I made quite a spectacle of myself. This morning opened up with some 140 e-mails. No big deal. There was this idiotic flamewar in linux-il about C++ vs. C, and in my stupidity I let myself get dragged into this. I should really learn to stay out of these idiotic flamewars. Well, one good thing that might come out is that we'll have a "What is object-oriented?" symposium with lots of cool linux people. Now I'm half dead, of course, but it feels good. I have to tell Ira that I disagree with his definition of Osh Pallaw -- it's supposed to be made from beef, not chicken or lamb.

Big argument in Python-dev about what to put in 2.0. I hope list comprehensions and augmented assignments won't make it because I think they're too new. While I'm up against Guido, it seems MH and /F are on my side. Time will tell.

Big argument in hackers-il about logic and stuff. Boy, do I hate it when non-mathematicians try to sound as if they know something. Logic is simple -- anyone who can muck with Perl can learn logic. Instead, all they do is misquote various Goedel theorems. Bah!

Today I learned about the jitterbug Python database, and tried to correct one bug I found on it (anydbm couldn't recognize Python's dumbdbm). Guido didn't like my solution, so I modified it a bit, and sent it to him again. I hope it makes it in before 2.0, unlike some unnamed features <wink>.

Last night I had step aeorobics yet again. Loads of fun -- I took a double-height step. I got home half dead and exhausted and read mail. Big thread in linux-il about a mythical IGLU cabal. Of course, there is no IGLU cabal. This morning there were lots of e-mails to handle, and lots of things to answer. Python development seems to be getting back on track, now that the dust has more or less around the CNRI-BeOpen issue.

Whoooowoooo!!!! What a weekend. Pezz went away to France, so in Friday, we ate for two hours at the Mongolian Grill Bar. It was fun! We ate so much, but actually felt good afterwards. Then we ate some ice-cream and almost burned down the restaurant.

Saturday was supposed to be geek night, which turned into geek day -- Ira and Stav and some anonymous friend of Ira's went to visit me and install network. We found out that PCI doesn't work with ISA hardware, so Ira will have to think about another solution (;-) ) -- perhaps, in the mean time, I can manage to plip it. Anyway, we had loads of fun just talking.

Then Ira went to his Mom's, and after an hour or so we were invited to eat leftovers, which were really really good. Then Stav and myself went back to my house to watch "True Lies". Amusing. Then Ira joined us, we watched the end of the movie, and talked for a long time afterwards about all kinds of things, both related and not related to computers.

This morning Ira gave me POP3 access on his server, so now I have an infinite amount of email addresses. I'm going to do at least "where has my email gone" research pretty soon.

Step aerobics last night was fun. It was the third (and last) time with the same combination, so we managed to complete it, and do it really well. I even managed to talk with the women there a bit -- seems one there is a database consultant. I wisely refrained from letting her know my opinions on RDBMS and how much they are evil, and how object-databases will come and kill them, and was politely interested.

Ally McBeal was really good on TV, so I didn't go to sleep too early. This morning I could hardly wake up.

It seems Linux will finally find a way into my company -- first as a CD burner (Oh! The humiliation). Well, to tell the truth, CD burner is probably the only job on earth I'd prefer a Linux system to a FreeBSD system, since it has much better hardware support. Just had an argument with my team leader about which distribution to install. He wants to stick to Red Hat, which is probably a sensible thing to do. I think someone should build Debian GNU/Red Hat Linux <wink> -- rpm sucks dead bunnies through a straw (a phrase I learned from Andrew M. Kuchling).

I played around with PikiPiki some more. The code was a bit of a mess, so I cleaned it up. I also made it more indepndant, by tossing the CSS and PNG references. I hope I can make it small enough so it will be seconds to install it. You aren't going to do it is *the* way to go.

Yesterday night I almost thought I'd be at work until midnight or something, but at 19:00 everything worked and I could go to Debi. However, because I finished earlier and Debi wasn't ready, I went and ate one and a half fallafels. It was fun. Then I got to Debi before Alex and Pezz, and stole hands from her. Wuuuu!!!!!! Debi hands!!!!!!! I miss Debi (see Debi?). Then, of course, I couldn't eat anything at Debi's, and she pretended to be insulted, and I pretended to be sad. Then, half-asleep, I had to drive Pezz home and then drive myself home. That was hard.

This morning I finally did what I wanted to do for a few days now and rewrote completely posixpath.normpath. It was fun -- the kind of Python code that's so much fun it's amazing. Other then that, Barry agreed with me about zip(a) and Gordon half-agreed with me. I think I prefer to throw an exception now, because if half of Python-Dev got it wrong, so could a lot of innocent people. Barry tossed around the idea of a "generator" module, and I +1'ed. It's a bummer most of Python-Dev are in the US -- I seldom get to communicate efficiently there.

Waiting anxiously for Friday, when there will be a Python Consortium meeting. Hopefully, big powerful companies will beat sense into CNRI.

I miss Debi's hands!!!!! Debi's wonderful hands!!!! Wuuuuu!!!!!

I made a little web research for WikiWiki clones, and found out about PikiPiki, a Pythonic WikiWiki which has as a priority ease of installation. Ultracool. I'm starting to use it as my main knowledge base.

Went to Norman's Steak and Grill last night. Ate the Sumo Burger -- it's a 1kg hamburger. I'm not going to eat again for the next year or so, I think. When I signed in their hall of fame book, I wrote a proof of Cantor's Theorem (there are more real numbers then natural numbers) using Cantor's Lemma (every decending sequence of closed segments whose length tends to zero has a non-zero intersection). Then I turned to other pages to see all of them(!) had a story about how they've eaten the hamburger. Losers! Then I added a PS with a Python 1-liner to print all the prime numbers between 1 and 1000.

Talked some more to Shae about BRM. Some wonderful ideas -- maybe I should document them somewhere more public. Also tried to convince him compression is an optical illusion, and there is no compression until probabilities on bit sequences are defined. We also talked a bit about rifles. Was fun.

Big argument on python-dev about zip(). Doesn't really matter, though -- I'm certain they'll end up throwing an exception. We're trying to get some patches off the table, but not having any of the PythonLabs stuff around except Barry makes it harder -- too many things are "Wait for Tim and Guido".

Step Aeorobics last night was loads of fun, but a bit hard -- I haven't done double step in a long time. I actually didn't believe I'll last the whole lesson, but I did. Whooo!!! However, that meant I didn't have any time to write my "poor man's wiki in a single funcion" Python HTTP server. Oh well. Looked last night at FreenetLib. I can't understand why itamar put it under Freenet/Contrib, rather then dignifing it with its own place. I looked over the code and found a cycle, and figured a way to solve it -- I hope it's still under active development -- I'm not sure I have time to lead a free software project :-(

I've had a good look around WikiWikiWeb, and it was great! It's really impressive, considering it doesn't rely on permissions. Things like that restore my faith in human-kind.

I've started having ideas related to Bicycle Repair Man and comment preservation. Here's how it goes -- have a tokenizing pass over the file, and save the comments together with line numbers. Then, go over the AST and attach "comment" nodes to the relevant nodes with the closest line numbers. I hope Shae notices this diary entry, but I'll send him mail sometime this evening at any rate.

Whoooo.....what a weekend I've decided I'll stop the bullets in my diaries -- I'm getting sick of those. Anyway, I went out with Stav to Mike's Place where we drank strange coctails the cute barwoman chose for us, and talked about all sorts of interesting things. The singer, which looked f**king good, was simply wonderful -- I suddenly understood "no woman, no cry" is a great song, if you only do it right. Anyhow, after what Stav told me, I decided I'd finally figure out this freenet thing, and boy, are they proffessional paranoids, or what! I think I'll write a Python client someday.

I've PEPed the idea for a sumo interpreter...it's not so urgent, since it's waiting for Python 2.0. We tried convincing the MatPy guy that new operators in Python aren't really needed. Don't know if it got through. Paul Prescod started pushing for a help() function in the interpreter. He got very positive reactions, including a prototype for a Python pager from me (coded it during the commercials <wink>).

I've talked to Ira and Stav, and I have to find time during the week to buy the ethernet cards and a spare keyboard so we can finally get me a working computer system.

My cow-orkers are starting to get on my nerves. Minutes after I've left my old team, the team leader decided he wants me to do something. *After* we explicitly agreed on what I have to do before I leave the team. Then one of the people disconnected my Solaris because "nobody's sitting next to it". Yeah, and the network is just a sci-fi dream, isn't it?

* Woke up to find Shae Erisson certified me, and was happy to find me. Talk about being flattered.

* Trying to convince people on python-dev that xmap() has great potential. Greg Wilson thinks it's wrong that xmap() differs from map() by only one letter. Perhaps map() should always be lazy, and to eagerly evaluate you have to have list(map())?

* Thinking about having a birthday party for Chen. It sure won't be surprise now, which is probably all for the best. Update: Chen doesn't want a birthday party which isn't managed by her.

* Seems things are going all right, and we'll have a zipper in Python soon. Got some nice backup from Ping.

* Started to drive the movement for a rich Python interpreter.

* Certified some more on Advogato. This is real fun -- seeing how many people here I know.

* Trying to get my company to put a Zope server on the intranet