Schedule A

Back from a little unscheduled downtime. WordPress was giving an “Error establishing a database connection” message and I didn’t have time until today to figure out what was happening. That isn’t quite true, I did have time to check my wp-config.php and to test my username, password, and database name to make sure they were [...]

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A few years ago now, Guido van Rossum endorsed Django by saying it was his personal favorite. At the time I had read the docs once and kind of tried it, but something rubbed me the wrong way. There was just too much structure, which for whatever reason didn’t fit what I was trying to [...]

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I came cross a post today by James Bennett on “magic” in general but more specifically in Python, Django, and Rails. I tend to think that most critiques which invoke the term “magic” are simply expressing part of the Python philosophy which says “explicit is better than implicit”. Just because something is better though, doesn’t [...]

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Consider the following Object Oriented code: class Foo { private int bar; public int getBar() { return this.bar; } public bool setBar(int i) { this.bar = i; return true; } } When learning the art of writing code, especially if you start in a language like Java, you are told to keep your data private [...]

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In the middle of working on the distributed build system, I noticed some very strange behavior with values appearing in lists that should not be there. It seemed like my default parameters weren’t initializing correctly. I never tracked down the source of the bug and just hacked around until it worked. Yesterday I got reading [...]

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Welcome to the future of digital content delivery. Really just content delivery as nearly all content can be found in a digital form today. The goal was simple: to watch Aardvark’d a documentary about four interns at Frog Creek Software. The first attempt was to search the torrent based systems that is the today of [...]

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iTunes is a way to organize your music files. In many ways it is the most developed form of domain specific file manager. The only problem is it takes the abstraction to far, not letting you perform file system based operations easily. The simplest would be filter by file system location. I added my whole [...]

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This an extension of the idea that always casting is annoying, and never what you want. Specifically having a language so object oriented that everything is an object with all objects having a top level object they inherit from and containers are implemented by storing these top level object is never what we want. Doing [...]

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Behind the scenes we have been going from server to new server. Normally it would be nice if ya’ll didn’t have to notice, but this is a cheap 2 bit operation, so what an you expect. Default C# Parameters C# doesn’t have default parameters. For example this doesn’t not work: void foo(int i, int b [...]

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I think I have come across something that should be fixed in Python. Either that or I just need more wisdom. One of the things I really like about Python is explicit scoping. You must always use the “this pointer” (“self” usually in Python, by convention). You usually specify what module symbols are coming out [...]

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