One Python per child

Python on the $100 laptop. Very interesting.

When all you have is a hammer...

I've been reading some Heidegger recently. For no good reason, these popped into my head this a.m. so I'm writing them down before I forget them.

They made me chuckle for a second but then again, maybe I'm just plain odd :-)

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks line a broken referential totality.

Or, veering towards the East:

When all you have is a hammer, you cease to have a hammer.

Have glue. Will travel.

Fact: most applications are built by combining existing applications and/or existing libraries of code.

Fact: a critical component of programmer productivity is the ability to re-use existing knowledge as well as existing code.

Fact: programming languages - especially general purpose programming languages - are examples of re-usable knowledge.

Intermediate Conclusion:
Having a "glue language" that you can use everywhere you work now and everywhere you might work in the future, from Linux to Windows to Mac to JVM to .NET to System 390 mainframe to Mobile Phone is a honkingly good idea.

Suggestion: A glue language that flows around all your existing libraries and integrates seamlessly with the feature of the local platform is a very, very desirable attribute of a glue language.

Fact: Python (or CPython if you like) runs... well, everywhere.

Fact: Jython does a stunningly good job of seamlessly integrating with the JVM platform.

Fact: Python is becoming so pervasive and so well known that it is now bordering on the (gasp) "safe" categorisation for even the most conservative enterprise application development.
(Newsflash: Python has been a completely safe bet for years now but it has taken time for the news to trickle all the way up.)

Fact: IronPython is now at version 1.0. .NET fans of my acquaintance say it features fall-off-your-chair-type excellence.

Final Conclusion:
I'll leave that up to you.

Menu Option Judo

"Armed with enough options, your application is not only impervious to blame attacks, it is seen as being more powerful to boot. You cannot lose." -- Menu Option Judo

Picking an MP3 player for geeking it up on the road

I have taken to downloading lots of audio lately, ranging from conference talks on the philosophy of mind, through to classic novel audiobooks. I listen to this stuff in the car, playing it out through the speakers using a casette adapter.

I have a hard disk based MP3 player but I decided I wanted a flash-based MP3 player that I could just plug into my Ubuntu box and copy MP3 files across to it. No drivers, no GUIs, thank you very much.

I wanted it to be powered by AAA batteries. I can get these in every little shop I might pass by in my car. I don't want yet another cable that connects to the cigarette lighter or requires me to boot up my laptop to syphon power from the USB.

For bonus points, I wanted something that I could pause, say, 30 minutes into a 1 hour audio talk and then resume at that point.

I wanted something "reasonably cheap". Although that phrase is almost devoid of meaning in any context in ireland.

I ended up taking a risk on a LOGIK 1GB MP3. The chap in Dixons was not able to tell me much about it because, as a Linux user, I was clearly some mad extra-terrestrial anarchist with a beard. He had fact after fact for me about Windows XP though.

Anyway, it works great. It just works with Ubuntu. The controls are simple and not those "trendy" ones aimed at 16 year olds with Barbie doll-sized fingers, perfect coordination and perfect eyesight. I can hit pause and - as long as the battery holds out - I can resume at the same point. Perfect for 1 hour breaks in restaurents on a long road trip. My hard disk MP3 player used to shut itself down after 10 minutes. Grrrr.

If 80 gigs is enough, then...

"Wouldn't it be great if copying an 80GB hard disk bit-for-bit was something you could do with a stand-alone device selling for a few hundred dollars and perhaps conveniently located for pay-per-use in shopping malls and airports?" --
If 80 gigs is enough, then....

Invisible, silent background backup of key files every day

I have made a little tweak to my backup strategy on my Thinkpad T42P that runs Ubuntu.

The way I see it, the bit most likely to go kaput is the hard disk so copying key files off of the hd every day is a good idea.

Now, I'm not guaranteed to be online all day so backing up to the cloud or the mother ship is not always an option. I don't have a floppy drive and even if I did, it would be too small. I have USB slots but memory sticks protrude out of them. I end up taking them out of the slot to put my machine in its bag yada yada. I have a CD-RW but I cannot dedicate that to doing backups as I use it during the day for other stuff.

Soooooo...I got a 256MB Compact Flash thingy and put it in a PCMCIA adapter. It sits completely inside the form factor of the T42P which means I can slot it in and just forget about it.

Cron now takes a backup every day of my key files to the CF. Unseen, unheard and completely hands (and thought) free. All I need to do is remember from time to time to check the log to make sure its still working as planned.

This is not a substitute for using online backup daily of course. After all, if my laptop gets stolen the CF is gone as well as the HD. But it does give me the confort of knowing that all my short-cycle backup eggs are not in the same basket.

The only fly in the ointment is this thing about CF devices having a write limit. I'm not sure how many write operations I expend in copying about a dozen files and I don't know what the magic number write limit on my card is yet.

If anybody is interested, setting up the CF on Ubuntu was just a matter of adding this to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hde1 /media/compactflash vfat defaults 0 0

The device appeared as hde1. I created /media/compactflash as a mount point. And off it went.