Older blog entries for moshez (starting at number 18)

Last night I had a great Step Aerobics lesson. The regular teacher was sick, and an apparently much more popular teacher substituted. It was hard! It was very fast-paced, which made it difficult both technically and physically. I got out half dead. Linux-il is trying to design a dinner, and it seems I won't be there, since I don't want to pay taxes to the "Rabbanut", and they're insisting on a kosher place. Bummer. I got the LJ yesterday, and started reading it. Nice articles, though some of them are really for novices. Reuven's article was nice, though I haven't began reading it seriously. I did notice a slight error (cnn.com should be .cnn.com, otherwise the cookie wouldn't be sent to www.cnn.com). On a similar streak, a server-side Cookie module is finally making it's way into Python. AMK has finally gone over my docos for Cookie, so I'm feeling safer. I should figure out how to document that __repr__ is the same as .output() -- I'm starting to think the whole Python documentation mechanism should be *really* built from the ground up. JavaDoc never had some problems, because there's no overloading in Java. Hmmmmmmm............

Well, finally I got of my butt and wrote another entry. So much has changed since the last diary entry, it's simply amazing. For one thing, I've quit my job -- I'm going to work for Lerner doing web development. Finally, some hope of using Python is in my future, in a company that is actively for me being on the Python development team. It should be loads of fun to work. Of course, just meeting Reuven was a draining experience -- my car died a day before, and we had to make several trips to the idiots at the car shop before they managed to fix my car via brute force. Well, finally people who are worse at what they do then programmers. Oh, well. Now I'm happily learning database stuff, which is really cool. Though I still believe object databases are the future <wink>. I'm going out a lot these days with both Alex and Debbi, and Ira and Stav, usually not at the same time. For Alex's birthday, I brought Stav, and just like I predicted, Debbi and him got along really well. (Well, all it takes to get along with Debbi is to say good things about Macs, which he did...). Last night there was a cool late Too Be'av (the Jewish love-day or something) party in Sataf. Loads of fun -- lots of people from where I served in the military, lots of people from hi-tech company. It took a concious effort not to talk about computers, but I guess I managed well in the face of temptation. I met lots of people I haven't seen for a while, like Vadik and Yuval Aharoni, laughed a bit at people still doing military service and had lots of fun. It's nice to see that old military rivalries never die -- you explain to people that where you served you made fun of where they serve semi-professionally. (To those who understand, the word "niggers" comes to mind). I met this really cute girl called Michal, and we ended up talking half the night about everything. I even managed to get a phone number from her, which made me really happy. Well, perhaps I am over Chen already. Which reminds me, IGLU is starting to form a non-profit, which is cool. The coolest thing is that the organizational commitee is called "The IGLU Cabal". That seems like a good time to tell the true story about the IGLU cabal. One day, Stav, Ira and myself were in Ira's house talking, when I suddenly said "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a rumour about an IGLU cabal, and everyone kept denying it? Probably merely denying it vehemently enough would make people sure it exists." Well, the decision was that come morning, I'll spoof an e-mail asking "What is the IGLU cabal?", and all of us will repsond with "There is no IGLU cabal", and put it in our signatures. To anyone doubting the story, check the mail headers -- Yaron Cohen was from "prof-sol-....netvision.net.il", which is "Proficiency Solutions" (the old name of my company) and netvision is the ISP.). Well, it went off really well, and apparently denying it vehemently enough actually created it -- which proves reality imitates the imagination. Well, all in all the last days were a hectic jumble of fun and extreme emotions, but now I'm happy.

Wow, today was a blast (a hard one, though). I got up at 6:30 am to clear my car out -- I actually thought I was driving 4 people *execpt* myself. Scary. Anyway, my dad even helped me check for oil and water (it's 30 degrees celsius outside -- you need water) Stav called to say he missed Alex Schintman (sp?) and is coming over by taxi. I told him no problem -- I'll wait for him. 5 minutes later I get a call from Alex, saying he waited for Stav, and to wait for them. Well, of course we got out only at 8:15. I'm getting out of mevasseret, into the highway, when Stav suddenly remembers, he forgot his back, and his not coming back to Jerusalem. Well, what could I do? Turned at Abu Gosh, back to my house, picks the bag from Alex's car, and we continue. It's 8:30 already, and I really want to be there. Well, step on the gas! Driving in my usual fast-though-careful-and-polite way, I got there within an hour. Well, alls well that ends well, I guess. In there, there was a hillariously funny seremony where CompaQ gave IGLU the server (should be in place by monday), and then Moshe Bar's talk started. An amazing guy -- he knows *so* *much*. I was impressed -- he doesn't write in LJ for nothing. Well, it was a very enlightening talk. During the coffee break, I swapped C++ war stories with a programmer at Epitera. Fun. After the break, he tried to get Israeli companies on the Open Source bandwagon. I'm for it -- it'll make Israel a better place for Open Source freaks like me. We swapped stories about how it is to be a Moshe in the Free Software world -- our name marks us for life -- not like the Gregs and Alexs of the world. Fun, fun. Later, I built a well-off (as opposed to rich) Python interpreter -- and found a bug in the test suite for linuxaudiodev -- it complained about bugs if the user has no permission to access the SB, or if there is simply no SB. I checked in a fix to make it ignore the warning in an ugly way. Thomas W fixed regrtest.py, and I checked in a correction. (Of course, I had to go and mix tabs and spaces, and later fix that. A day just isn't worth it if I don't prove to python-dev I'm an idiot <wink>.). Well, then I started compiling the Python interpreter with -Wall -Werror (well, what's life without knowing your inner anal retentive). Made some fixes in that area too. SF CVS caused some problems along the way. I shouldn't complain, really, the SF guys are nothing short of amazing. Then, I decided to check out "screen". Boy -- this is my dreams coming through -- everything VCs were meant to be and more. And copy-and-paste with the keyboard only simply bought me. I'll bow and pray to the guy who wrote screen, and it's even free. Well, vrms doesn't complain -- which is good enough for me.
If it was good enough fro Stallman....
Oh, and I talked to Debi and Alex (the real Alex -- Alex U) on the phone, since Alex had to go and drive to KG. Bummer. Well, it's his mother's birthday, and all. Wuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!! What fun to me!!!!!!!! I talked to Debi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last night I met with Debi, now that Alex is away. I'm so cruel...I was supposed to teach her Python, but she was a bit tired. So I just showed her what's WikiWikiWeb is all about and maybe she can use that. Then I showed her Jeffrey Elkner's and myself's book. Then we just talked about all kinds of things. I didn't really want to say goodbye, so we ended up saying goodbye for a long time. This morning I finally had time to close the bug I fixed in Python, which was loads of fun.

I also managed to get PEPs for docstring format and hooking the p in repl assigned to me. Hopefully, I'll be able to put in some work on them this evening. I've already downloaded my heat-generating proposal from last time, and I think I sort of know what to fix:

• "Display" markup should be very light-weight -- nothing more then b[text in bold], i[text in italics], and p[code], etc. (The good thing about using [], is that since most code has balanced [], you won't need to explicitly escape anything most of the time.
• "Semantic" markup should enable reference to the surrounding program: an unadorned [] around something that matches the "name" production should produce a reference to whatever it is: it should see if it is defined as a function/class, if it is a class variable, if it is given as an argument to a surrounding function, if it is a module (the filename minus the .py or something that is in "import foo" or "from foo import ...".)
• A consecutive number of lines starting with >>> or ... should be marked up as an example.
• If there is the pattern "example::\n\n<increase in indentation>" everything until a corresponding dedent is marked up as an example too.

Well, as it will shortly be explained, yesterday I could not post a diary entry. However, today I can, thanks to Adi's undying efforts. (Thanks, man!) Adi came to visit me, and helped me get my computer up and running. Now it is working fine, with all the frills, and I can finally contribute to Python comfortably. Adi and I played with the computer until 21:00, and then I drove him home. Then I began the long ride to Herzelia (45 minutes legally, 30 minutes my way). I got to Gidi's birthday party a bit late, but had loads of fun. I met all the guys from the military, and we swapped experiences, starting with the common question "Which start-up do you work for?" (except, of course, the people still in the army....) Lots of cute girls too, so there was even a lovely scenery. Then I got back home, resynced with the Python CVS tree and went to sleep. Later today I got up and checked in my long waited patches. The effbot didn't like one of them, and decided to say so only *after* I checked it in. I still think it's good -- we'll see.

Last night I went to Step Aerobics, and again took a double-height step. (In case anybody is sick of reading about aerobics practice, well, I don't care. It's my diary <wink>) It really killed me -- I could hardly drive home afterwards. Was fun enough. I went home, read some e-mails and went to sleep like a baby.

This morning it took me only a hour and a half to deal with last night mails, probably because there aren't big debates I'm involved with in any mailing list that matters.

Wuuuu!!!!!!!! Debi!!!!!!!!!!! (so she'll be able to find her name)

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.