Oblomovka

2003-08-09»

I’ve got a new medium-sized project to be working on. It’s just me coding it at the moment but at some point (if it comes together), I do want to be able to pass it on to someone else, preferably without apologising first.

I’m utterly torn between Perl and Python. My first choice in this case would be Python, because bad Python code doesn’t seem to be quite so personal. I’ve seen people spit blood at other coder’s Perl, just because it’s not the way that they would do it. Perl demands rather more sympathy with your predecessor than does Python. With Python, it’s just more code to stare at.

That said, your successor does need to actually know the language. Most of the people I can imagine maintaining this code will know Perl but not Python. Python doesn’t take that long to learn, but reading Python to take on someone else’se project just isn’t much *fun*. Sitting down to learn someone’s Perl, while tough, does teach you about the way they were thinking when they wrote the application. Python’s clarity, I think, cuts down on its expressiveness in depicting why certain decisions were made. When I had to hunker down and learn POE or Moveable Type, for instance, I came away with a very deep understanding of how it was supposed to work. It was fun, albeit time-consuming. I sometimes have problems doing the same with slabs of Python code, just because they can be very lacking in personality.

That said, I’m not paid to be a programmer. What is fun is a hobby can be skull-crackingly frustrating in a job with a deadline.

I eventually made the decision to go with Perl and Mason – mainly because of Mason. I know a lot of people who know Mason who I can ask when I got stuck, and there’s a fair bit of this code that will end up being on a Website, eventually. There don’t seem to be any Python templating solutions that stand head-and-shoulders above the crowd (and whose implementors I know). I felt that going with Perl would provide my successor with a clearer understanding of the whole project, and not necessarily lock me into an immature Web tech that no-one knows.

Now, a couple of days into it, I’ve begun to seriously reconsider. I’m nowhere near the Mason bit of the application, and I’m getting continually bogged down in Perl style issues that really don’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to write.

To be honest, I think this is my Perl rustiness kicking in; and I think it may go away after a few more days hacking. Worse, though, is the effect of something I thought would be a real boon – CPAN. There’s a bunch of useful utilities there that I’d love to suck in and use in my program. But they all have different idioms – all of which I have to sit down and learn. Plus there’s the whole dependency issue: sooner or later I’m going to have to install all of this on the working server, and there’s a real penalty to be paid for being dependent on a lot of scattered Perl modules. Will they work? Will they still be maintained? Which of alternative implementations should I choose?

So, I’m going to spend this weekend having a bash at a Python version. My XPish working style has recently become dependent on a lot of Python features, and the Python core library has most of what I need in the way of modules. I really haven’t written much code, so there’s not much time lost. And I figure that if it all goes to hell in Python too, I’ll learn my lesson quickly and go slinking back to Perl with my tail between my legs. Plus, no-one’s paying me to be decisive here. As if anyone would.

I still don’t know of a good, solid, Python templating language though. Or rather, I know of three or four, but I don’t know anyone who has used any of them seriously in high-volume production environments. I’m not interested in Zope or Twisted (tempting though they are) because I’d be obliged to wrap my solution in their terms, but I really don’t know whether I should go for SkunkWeb or WebWare or Spyce or any of the others.

Right now, I’m delaying the decision until I’m a bit deeper into the code. Which feels a bit uncomfortable. But under the terms of XP, perhaps forgiveable.

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2003-08-07»

There’s a US federal law which lets individuals prohibit companies from sending unsolicited sexually provocative or erotically arousing mail. According to the postal ruling implementing this law, “”Postmasters may not refuse to accept a Form 1500 because the advertisement in question does not appear to be sexually oriented. Only the addressee may make that determination.”

Kayne McGladrey is doing the obvious thing: declaring that all those Sharper Image catalogues and coupon collections are quite filthy, and should be exorcised from her letter box. Instructions included.

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Learn something new every day, with the vim.org tips RSS feed. (Thanks, Phil!)

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2003-08-06»

A friend of mine was going to drop by while on a trip to San Francisco in a few months. Not anymore. He’s a french citizen living in the UK. When he went to renew his passport, he discovered that the french consulate can’t provide him with a machine-readable passport. And from October the 1st, the US is refusing visa-waivers to anyone without one. You have to get a normal visa. Male visa applicants aged between 16-45 also have to fill in this new extra form, DS-157.

Questions on the new form include:

• Mother and father’s full name.
• All the countries you have entered in the last ten years (with year)
• Your last two employers (with address, telephone number and supervisor name)
• All professional, social and charitable organisations to which you belong or have belonged, contribute or have contributed or with which you work (or have worked)
• All educational institutions you attend or have attended (excluding elementary school)
• A list of specific locations you will visit in the US

Understandably, he objects to filling in this form. So he’s not coming.

There’s a lot of problems with demanding info like this, but I just want to concentrate on one.

Most American voters will never see this form, and neither will the citizens of countries that the US media listens to.

But the majority of people visiting the US will. Any male between 16-45 coming from these countries will:

And this is what they will learn of this country: that it requires that a large amount of biographical data be handed over to its government. It obligatorily requires anyone to reveal any and all organisations, political or social, of which they are a member. That its government also demands to know the location of those within its borders, and the precise time of their movements. And that men and women are to be treated differently.

I think it’s one thing to require visitors to a country to obey its laws, and comply with its values. But to propose a set of rules like this that seem to me to represent the very opposite of those values – well, that seems to be not only wrong, but a strong danger sign.

I keep on asking: if this bureacracy, this data collection, this process is necessary or even useful, why is it not applied to all Americans too? Or, if the administration is only worried about foreign terrorists, all visitors?

I cannot imagine that the percentage of terrorists in the sum of non-visa waiver countries is much larger the some total of terrorists globally. Either way, it is a tiny fraction. Why are we collecting so much data on the rest of the world? And if it is not a problem – a minor inconvienience – why don’t we subject ourselves or the majority of Europeans to it, too. What do we have to fear?

I really think that these questions should be universally required, or not required at all.

Or is it simply because we know that Europeans, and Americans have a greater voice; can declare these questions to be against their natural rights? Do they have more natural rights than others? Is that what the bill of rights means? That these rights are reserved only for American citizens and their companions? Is that what the creators of these rules propose?

I worry about this, and I worry about any number of other proposals that seem to go through without the slightest oversight by all the checks and balances of this country. And I worry that the people who are in charge don’t seem to consider what they are doing might be wrong.

The point at which the Constitution becomes little other than a crucifix one waves at powerful figures who have no understanding or sympathy with the values it represents, is a point I believe it at risk of becoming useless, even to those few who can still shelter behind it.

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2003-08-05»

My editor mailed me to ask about that last entry, and whether we should rewrite the piece. He said someone had pointed it out to him.

Someone, my foot. Do you see what this is? This is the Internet getting back at me again. Leave me alone, Internet, I say, waving my fist in an indescribable direction.

And I’ve finished the CD-ROM piece (it was all right), even though when I started to do some last minute research, the first site that came up for my google search terms was my own QuickTopic page. Oh very clever, Internet. Very sarcastic. Just because you don’t want to do all the work.

I’m not linking to anything on this entry, just to punish it.

Oh alright, here’s some nostalgic reminiscences about people’s first computers.

You liked me then.

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2003-08-04»

I’ve just spent about two weeks researching various Wi-Fi contention and multi-hop routing issues for an article. And within minutes of finishing it, Slashdot runs two stories that would have saved me most of that time. And which, anyway, now transform my ingenious point into common knowledge for most /. readers.

I hate the Net. Hates it, hates it.

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2003-08-02»

Flew up to Portland and back down, which involved getting up at 5AM and stumbling home for 5PM. Was absolutely worth it though, as I slid into being a guest at my grandparents-in-law’s wedding. Annie and Russell are a fine couple and were dressed to the nines. They’re both over eighty, and have been living together for thirty years. It was beautiful, so beautiful in fact that every picture Quinn and I took ended up looking like the arresting front-cover image from a major corporate rebranding exercise.

(from Quinn’s moblog)

Can’t you see that on a double-page spread, with “For All The Colours Of Your Life: Reckitt Industrial ” underneath?

I have an even better one of Annie talking on a mobile phone while Rusell looks on, from behind a big wedding cake. I await the call from Verizon’s marketing team.

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2003-08-01»

Spent the day not-writing in the brand spanking new MLK Public Library in San Jose. It’s a co-operative venture between San Jose University and the city itself. Puzzling over how to get to the uni and the town’s residents to integrate better, they decided to smersh their two (slightly poor) library collections together into one $178 million co-venture.

It’s worked amazingly well. Everything was running smoothly on the first day. They’ve combined the two catalogues (even though one used Dewey and the other the Library of Congress cataloguing system), and moved both groups of readers into a brand new building.

There are 150 data-ports in the building for laptops, about three hundred PCs for general use, and hundred laptops that can be loaned. See how long they last. (No wifi yet, though.) Looks like they’ve negotiated deals with all the SJSU academic database providers – so I can get LexisNexis ,the O’Reilly Safari. book collection, the OED and a stack of other for-money subscriptions if I access them from within the building.

The printed book collection really benefits from the merge. The usual popular introductions to non-fiction fields are all there, courtesy of the public library, and backed up with several large research collections if you’re tempted to pursue any in more detail. I love deep, wide archives like this.

The selection gets more and more ethereal as you clamber up the seven floors. There’s a browsing section on the ground floor, laid out like a bookstore, and at the very top, there are piles of SJSU theses, empty group study rooms and that hay-and-dust smell of old, hardbound stacks.

But my favourite moment was when Quinn and I were snooping around the pop fiction section. Someone leant on the “Mystery” bookshelf. It swung around, to show a false shelf of books behind with a fake secret passage.

A library with easter eggs!

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2003-07-31»

It’s been ten years since CD-ROM drives became affordable (prices dropped from $700 to $200 in 1993), and I’ve been asked to write a piece about the rise (and fall) (and rise) of the CD-ROM as a medium. As part of this, I’m doing a little retrospective of the best CD-ROMs of the decade.

It feels a bit odd to hive-off CD-ROM as a category. There’s something very 1996 about doing that. It does mean something, though: a package that depends on permanent storage rather than pulling data off the Net; whose form is melded around slow-access times, and perhaps nodding to that “digital book” ideal.

I’m guess I’m looking for apps that exploited the CD-ROM form well, and perhaps lived up to that all-to-brief moment of being the forefront of “interactive multimedia”, but have still managed to survive the test of time.

Me, I have a soft-spot for Voyager’s Spinal Tap, which not only set the standard for video CD-ROM, but I think defined how DVD bonus material would be executed. And I think I’ll include the original Myst (even though I’m a bit loathe to include every game too big to fit on floppies), because its rendered gameplay was such a ingenious exploitation of the large size of CD-ROMs, rather than clever programming. And then there’s the You Don’t Know Jack, spin-offs of which I still see for sale.

What are your favourites? All suggestions ungratefully purloined.

Discuss!

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2003-07-30»

Nigel Rantor is collecting datapoints to build an open 3D map of the London Underground, and is looking for suggestions as to what to do with it. Geowankers, assemble!

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