Decorators and Python

It's really neat to watch skilled project managers step up to the podium and in a few paragraphs walk through what's happened, what the options are, why he/she is choosing a specific option, and then examine the process through which they arrived at that option and suggest ways of fixing the process itself. I like projects like this.

Anyhow, Guido has written up his thoughts on the J2 proposal and seems like they're sticking with the @ proposal. I'm not sure what that means. I look forward to diving into Dive into Python and catch up on some of the language features I'm really missing out on. It'd help my projects out a bunch.

Long weekend of errands and bed frames

I took Friday off to finish moving out of my old place, renew my resident parking sticker, register my change of address with the post office, talk to the Sprint guys (that's detailed in the next post), pick up a new mattress, and then pick up all the building materials we needed to build the bed frame. My roommate had to save us at Home Depot because the plywood (which was cut into small sections) was too big to fit in my car. It was a long day and I was pretty tired.

Then on Saturday, we started assembling the bed frame from the plans I had drawn up a few days beforehand. We discovered we'd need another beam down the center of the bed and that I had miscalculated the number of board feet required for the legs of the bed (I forgot beds have four legs and not two). Then due to a lack of mitre saw or other right-angle-maker (in retrospect, I should have bought one), I spent some time trying to make right angles out of the cuts I had made. We did a trip to Home Depot to pick up another board and some joist pieces to afix the board to the head and foot pieces. Even with the delays and minor issues, we got one of the sides assembled and we were pretty happy with it. After a full day of working in 90 degree 150% humidity in the sun trying to overcome our minor issues, I was pretty tired.

On Sunday, I woke up and finished putting together the second side. Then I attached the head and foot pieces and had a completely assembled bed. My girlfriend came home from church and we ate some food and then did a round of staining with a 2-in-1 poly-urethane/stain. After staining, we discovered our hands and brushes were really sticky and we didn't have any mineral spirits (which is a solvent). I rushed over to Home Depot driving with my elbows and picked some up.

Now we have a lovely bed frame that I designed with lots of insight from my girlfriend and her dad and that we built together. Right angles on the bed are pretty short in number--but we can fix some of that later on if it becomes an issue.

Now I'm just super tired. Not to mention that my allergies went beserk this weekend whilst all this other stuff was happening.

So that brings me to the interesting part. Here's my list of things to keep in mind on building projects:

  • beds have four legs--not two

  • get a mitre saw to do right angle cuts (or alternatively you could get a table saw or even just build a guide for a circular saw)

  • ratchet sets make dealing with bolts and nuts a lot easier

  • it's all about a great set of clamps

  • measure, measure, cut

  • you can approximate right angle cuts after the fact by sanding the end of the board while making sure to flip the board over every 15-20 seconds of sanding--I find I must be putting more pressure on my right side than my left because that's the part that gets more sanding

  • know where your nearest hardware stores are and the times that they are open just in case you find yourself in a "predicament"

Craig of Craigslist interview

There's a great interview with Craig of Craigslist here at Wired Magazine. I have to say that after reading the interview, I'm really psyched the guy exists. From a selfish perspective, Craigslist is the glue that binds huge parts of my life and makes certain things infinitely easier to do. Through it I've met other people (like, for example, my current girlfriend who used Craigslist to find the room my brother used to live in); I've bought and sold stuff; I've done research on stuff; friends have bought furniture and advertised venues; ... He has single-handedly affected my life in great positive ways.

Anyhow, so I really like Craigslist and really appreciate that it's there. It provides community for us folks who move around a lot and don't have contacts and friends everywhere. It's a great service to people.

Having said all that, I'm filled with trepidation. I'm afraid that even though he's said all these wonderful things and I've never seen evidence that the things he's said in this interview are false, I can't bring myself to believe the statements. I half expect him to sell the shares anyhow. If everything Craig said is true--both today and tomorrow--then he is definitely the exception and not the rule.

Total foobar

I decided to release my old set of flavour templates on the flavour registry and in so doing totally foobarred all the times on all the files of my blog. I recovered most of them (because I have a mirror that's usually off by a few days), but then I had to guess on the times for the latest four entries.

So that sucked. Given what I just went through, I'm beginning to think it's a terrible idea to use the timestamp on the file as the mtime. Blech.

Thanks!

I didn't expect either of What to do with pyblosxom and Busy busy busy to drum up the response they did. I've gotten emails and comments from both entries that were way cool.

As a result, I've finally gotten around to building the flavour registry, I decided I'm going to see what's up and whether I'll work through a 1.1 release for PyBlosxom. We're working through what to do in regards to the filestat callback and possibly moving caching. I started investigating what would be involved in building a regression testing framework (which would double as a performance testing framework as well).

It's been a good couple of days. I really appreciate the advice and encouragement I've gotten. Thanks!

What to do with pyblosxom

David Ascher started using PyBlosxom and there are a couple of other users who look like they're just starting to use it as well. I think that's fantastic--especially given that the project is on life support right now.

Life support? What makes me say that? Well, I've been threatening to do a 1.0.1 release for months but never did it. Development has all but stopped because there aren't any active developers. Back when I released 1.0, I told people I wasn't going to touch it for 6 months because I was really burned out on this project and I had too many other things going on. So then nothing happened except a mild trickle on the mailing lists.

I'm not sure what to do. I can't really take on another project and push it through the motions. PyBlosxom has documentation, but it's mediocre and has large gaps and it's spread across two sites one of which I don't think most people get to. The debian maintainer for the PyBlosxom package needs help updating the package, but I don't know enough about packages to help and haven't had the time to work on it. There has been some interest in a flavour registry, but it seems that there's only interest from a "we want a flavour registry" perspective and very very little to no interest from a "I'd like to contribute to a flavour registry" perspective. Blah blah blah.

There are a bunch of issues and no one to solve them. I'm really hesitant to throw my energy at this project again. Part of me wonders if I should just start solving some of the smaller problems that need to get solved (lack of testing infrastructure, lack of centralized documentation, ...) and then go from ther step by step. Seems so overwhelming.

Not to mention that my life is a mess right now--I'm still moving and I've got a list of promises I haven't fulfilled dating back two or three years. Then I got bitched out on one of the projects I work on for being an elitist egomaniac. I just want to help identify and fix problems to make things better/easier/faster/more useful. Bummer.