Older blog entries for mwh (starting at number 11)

Hmm, been lazy about diary entries again.

What have I been doing these last three weeks? I don't really know.

Still this weekend was fun; Reading festival (just for the Saturday) and some hard-core lazing around.

In other news I seem to have become a moderator of the newly resurrected comp.lang.python.annou nce and associated mailing list. So far I've binned four bits of spam and passed this weeks Python-URL (which hasn't shown up yet...). It'll will hopefully get more interesting with time.

Bought Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Watch advogato eat that url.

It's interesting; I've always been fascinated by compilers - now maybe I can learn enough to work on one. Haven't got very far in the book, but the chapter on parsing has made some things very much clearer to me than they were before, so I have high hopes for the rest.

Following a tangentially related thread on python-dev, I've written up a patch that implements "extended slicing" for list objects in Python.

(Extended slicing is the "start, stop, step" style, for example

    >>> l = range(10)
  >>> l
  [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
  >>> del l[3:9:4]
  >>> l
  [0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9]
  >>> for i in l[::-1]: print i,
  ...
  0 8 6 5 4 2 1 0

I think it's generally cool, although assigments to extended slices are a bit wierd. We'll see where it goes...

Just to keep the diary ticking over...

It seems that spending all day every (week)day banging my head against C++ on Windows leaves me without any enthusiasm to put into hacking fun things like Python... there's a few things I would like to beat on, but I just can't find the motivation. Oh well.

Next year, presuming I'm job and not PhD-place hunting, I really must find a job that does not involve programming C++ on Windows. I usually like & enjoy programming, but this combination just takes all the fun out of it. It's a shame that (a) it's probably the commonest combination in advertised jobs (b) I'm actually pretty good at it and have more work experience in that than anything else. It'll give me something to talk/rant about in interviews, anyway.

I'm also starting to develop some fairly violent opinions about how IDE's should work (you call that integrated??), so maybe I should go play with IDLE.

Well, been at my summer job for a week and a half now; it's not bad, but it is programming C/C++ on Windows, so it's not great either.

Hacking-wise, still quiet. python-dev is getting just silly amounts of traffic at the moment and just following that takes up quite a bit of my time. Still, good stuff is happening (and more will happen when CNRI stop faffing around...)

Also, if anyone knows how to turn the caps lock key off in Windows, could they let me know how it's done? Ta.

Whew, so now I'm a BA (this is Cambridge; everone including scientists is a bachelor of "arts").

Bittersweet times; on the one hand I have a good degree, a satisfactory resolution to the last three years, and good prospects for the future but on the other many of my friends are leaving this year and things are generally a'changing.

In other news, I start my summer job tomorrow. It will actually be nice to have some order on my life after the somewhat chaotic post-exams period.

I've also finished The Business. It's, well, OK. If you've read much Banks before, there's not much new to be found. Still an entertaining read though.

My body has completely lost track of whether I should be awake or asleep at any given moment (so it tends to opt for somewhere in between).

Still, I start my 9-5 summer job in a week or so and that should sort my body clock out in short, if painful, order.

Iain Banks's "The Business" has finally come out in paperback, so I've bought that and am getting stuck into it. It's written in Banks's usual entertaining style, so it probably won't take too long to read. Opinions will probably appear here when I have read enough to have some.

Idle time at the moment.

Not much hacking, really. I've been working on a Python bytecode decompiler sporadically. I work on it for a bit, come across some unpleasant problem and drop it for a couple days. Getting there, but still some problems remain.

Have finally left Exam Hell.

Which is nice.

Also, it's a gorgeous day, so I think I'm going to be incredibly lazy (and maybe drink some beer at some point...) .

Only one more exam now; they've been going OK, I suppose.

Today's was annoying; did two questions very quickly, then spent an hour and a half getting nowhere before giving up in digust and walking out 20 minutes early. Ho hum.