I added the Request object to the locals for eval_python_block. I also did away with the "printout" kluge I had--you can use print now.
If you used an old version and are upgrading to this version, you'll need to convert all your "printout" function calls to regular print statements.
Find it in my plugin index.
My brother is organizing the 48 hour film thingy in Boston which kicks off tonight! I'm helping out to usher and perform in secret kick-off rituals that I don't really understand but turn out to be vital to the doings and goings-on of the 48 hour film thingy!
Anyhow, if you're in the Boston area, there are four showings of the final films: two at the Brattle and two at the Somerville Theatre.
Lots of details and a half-naked picture of my brother HERE.
One interesting thing about this one is that it's Spring Forward this weekend--so they "extended" it an hour so that the groups don't lose an hour if that makes any sense. I think maybe one of my jobs will be to hand out extra hours at the door--one per group please!
I've never really liked Java much. After using Java for 5 or 6 years in various projects, I can count the number of times I've been working on something in Java and thought to myself, "Gosh--I'm really psyched I'm doing this in Java" on one hand. I dislike it a lot less than C++, but I'm not sure that really counts for much. I'm ok with the language semantics--it's the API that really gets me.
Anyhow, the Javahut story in this article is pretty much what I'm thinking when I'm dealing with Java. To quote the passage:
Imagine if the Perl cafe and Javahut were across the street from each other. You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. "I'm sorry," says the person at the door. I'm not actually the hostess, I'm a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want." You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you'll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress. The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there's no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place. Dusting yourself off, you walk across the street to the Perl cafe. The person at the door asks what kind of seat you want, what you want to eat, and how you want to pay. They sit you at your seat, bring over your food, collect the money, and leave you to eat in peace. Sure, it's not the most elegant dining experience you ever had, but you got your food with a minimum of pain. -- James Turner
That sums up my feelings on the whole Java thing.
The bigger problem (and I think this is inherent in the Java community) is that there are all these Java developers who think in terms of massive object hierarchies and comprehensive APIs for every project. It takes forever to write the infrastructure that expose all the bits of data and functionality so that you can write the program to solve the problem.
Blech.
David Berkeley is a friend of a friend of mine and I was privelidged to see him play a month or so ago and it was a really great set. Anyhow, I finally got around to buying one of his albums and I really like it.
AMAZON::B00008KA60::The Confluence
His web-site (with some tunes you can download and test out) is at http://www.davidberkeley.com/.
You can (and should) also get his cds at CDBaby.com.
I bet I could come up with a usefulness score for a given web-page that's based on the ratio of number of images to number of words. I occasionally read articles about how people don't like to read large blocks of text and that it should be skimmable and blah blah blah--but in reality, I think if the ratio of images to text is high, then the page is making up for in visual appeal what it lacks in raw information.
I guess the issue is that I prefer sites that are more like books and encyclopedias than like marketing brochures.
I'm on the UserLinux discussion list mostly because it's really interesting to watch a distribution get going and also because I'm hankering for a user-oriented distribution that I don't have to fiddle with that I can do regular non-fiddling things with.
Anyhow, caught this email, which is fascinating--I had no idea (apologies to Mr. Perens for quoting without permission and out of context but I figure it's in the public archives anyhow):
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:41:44 -0800
From: Bruce Perens <---------------->
Reply-To: ---------------------------
To: ---------------------------
Subject: [Discuss] Meaning of the Debian Swirl
Fabio asked what the Debian Swirl means.
It's "magic smoke". Electrical engineer lore is that when you burn out
an electronic component, you cause the "magic smoke" that makes it work
to be released. Once the magic smoke is gone, the component doesn't work
any longer. Debian is supposed to be the magic smoke that makes your
computer work.
Thanks
Bruce
That's cool--I had no idea.
Also, I burned a Knoppix cd, brought my old Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop with a DLink wireless card right up, and installed Debian by typing:
knoppix-install
(or something very very similar) at the prompt and selecting debian-installation. It worked, it was trivial, and it was fantastic. My laptop was up and running in 30 minutes (from when I burned the cd to when the laptop had booted into Debian). Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Now I can _use_ it.
I'm tossing around getting an mp3 player again. My car only has a tape deck and the radio reception is kind of flakey for no apparent reason I can discern [1]. Also, I take the T around town frequently and it'd be nice to have a portable device that I can listen to at work, on my work commute, at home, on the T, and in other places.
I don't really need to upload my entire music collection. Having said that, I'm a mood-centric music listener and I have a bunch of different moods and it'd be nice to have at least 10 or 20 songs for each mood. Thus I've tossed around getting a hard-drive based player.
I'd rather have a player that doesn't require a fancy gui thingy on my host computer. Having said that, I realize those gui's are nice since they frequently build an index of the songs on the drive, so it makes boot up of the player <b>much</b> faster. I <b>HATE</b> Creative Labs Music Center (or whatever it's called). I've never used iTunes. I don't need something to categorize my life--just something to load songs onto the mp3 player.
I don't really care about size, but I'd like the player to fit in my pocket. I don't care about cool-factor. I don't care about user interfaces as long as I can select songs to play, play them, and skip songs I don't feel like listening to. I don't care about playing solitare or about organizing my life. A remote control would be nice but it's not necessary.
The battery has to last at least 6 hours and it's not acceptable for it to die in a year.
I don't want to pay a fortune. It has to be available at amazon.com.
And that's as far as I've gotten on this train of thought. Email willkg at bluesock dot org if you have ideas [2].
Conan had sent me MCCP handling code back in August or September. It took a while to design the filter hooks that needed to go into Lyntin 4.0 to accomodate network-level data fixing (encryption, compression, ...). After I had added those filter hooks, I never quite got enough time to sit down and finish up the MCCP module...
Until now.
Find the first draft of the Lyntin MCCP module here with the rest of my Lyntin modules and rejoice that I finally got this off my todo list! w00t!
It's a shame I can't somehow use the amazing amount of heat being generated by my computer which is doing regression tests to drive a humidifier. I think if I had the processor fan blowing the hot air across a dish of water, I wouldn't have to have a noisy processor fan AND a noisy humidifier in my cube.
The Groovy project is very well-named.