Going to a healthfarm

How can I say this? Ehm...

import time
MyWorkStuff.persist()
time.sleep (1209600)

I'm off on hols and going cold turkey on e-mail, blogging etc. I'm off to a health farm. Actually, no I'm not. That is a lie. I'm off to walk around Barcelona and eat my way throught its fish restaurents with my family. (It amounts to much the same thing:-).

Back on the 19th.

Going to a healthfarm

How can I say this? Ehm...

import time
MyWorkStuff.persist()
time.sleep (1209600)

I'm off on hols and going cold turkey on e-mail, blogging etc. I'm off to a health farm. Actually, no I'm not. That is a lie. I'm off to walk around Barcelona and eat my way throught its fish restaurents with my family. (It amounts to much the same thing:-).

Back on the 19th.

Bloglines - a blessing and a curse (and a happy birthday)

Bloglines is a year old today. I find it indespensible. Unfortunatly, its popularity has rendered by site stats system rather ineffective.

90% of the entries are of the form http://stats.blogger.com/redirector.pyra?t=http%3A%2F%2Fbloglines.com%2Fmyblogs_display%3Ffolder%3DNNNNN.

Is there a way to work back from this to the bloglines identity I wonder?

Vancouver Python workshop

Impressive list of talks coming up at the Vancouver Python workshop

Conference home page here.

Reading, writing, APIs, GETs, POSTs and poetry

THis weeks ITWorld article Two HTTP verbs diverged in a wood... is all about idempotency although the word is never mentioned.

Python and Java technology work together to solve the impossible

Python and Java technology work together to solve the impossible is the title of an article over on IBM Developerworks. [via Daily Python URL].

Jython is a wonderful tool to have in any test-driven application development plan. The speed with which you can implement new tests, slice and dice exisiting tests, create smart "batch" runs of tests etc. with Jython has to be seen to be believed.

If you are developing tests of Java code in Java. STOP RIGHT NOW! :-) Double your productive day with Jython. (I'm not kidding.).

Open Source JDNC

Interesting, JDNC is now open source.

Rich client development is an enigma in computing. It never ceases to amaze me how complex and ugly GUI code can get once you start doing serious app. dev. I have played with patterns like MVC, languages like Smalltalk, Python, Java, C++ etc. and never been happy with the code I've written for any of them to drive GUIs.

My latest theory is that GUI design lends itself to complexity because it combines an exploding state space with an exploding namespace.

The state space problem come from the need to handle modeless dialogs and the freedome they give users to trigger events in combinatoric orders. The name space problem comes from the fact that every event, every widget, every method, every callback, every include file, every bitmap, every mask, every state variable has a *NAME*.

Keeping GUI code from suffering entropy death involves constant, care and feeding of *NAMES* and that is very laborious and error prone in my experience.

THe more open source projects we have to do with rich GUIs the better. Doing it well, with the flexibility for change required in business-oriented applications, is a far-from-solved problem.

My own favourite cross-platform GUI (surprise, surprise) is wxpython. It does a very good job of alleviating the cruft attack of GUI-dev whilst leaving you access to the power of the "metal" underneath. Combined with py2exe, it is a powerful way to create Windows executables for distribution that do not require separate Python installs.

Hmmm, jython + JDNC = wxjython for Jave GUI App. Dev?

Drooooollllll.