Page of Moss - bloglet for Wednesday 27 February 2002

My mother's here. So I won't be blogging much. Till Friday. _
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02:11:40 AM, Wednesday 27 February 2002

What I really want right now is to watch a bunch of Max Headroom. _
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06:19:15 PM, Monday 25 February 2002

"A module for serializing and deserializing Python objects into XML is also included, as well as a number of demos." Intruiging. This could make the storage end of things go faster. _
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03:56:53 PM, Monday 25 February 2002

Yes, exactly! _
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02:21:36 PM, Monday 25 February 2002

Linguist's challenge for the day: explain the origins of the names of days of the week. They seem to mostly be named after gods, but from different traditions (Saturn is Roman, Thor is Norse or some such). Why is this? _
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12:23:22 PM, Monday 25 February 2002

Blast! I just went and opened the refrigerator, only to discover that I have no milk. This means no mocha for me this morning. Ah well--I shall just have to stop by the cafe on the way into work.

Still, overall, I'm quite happy with the way my mornings have been going over the past few weeks. Before, you see, the routine was something like this: alarm goes off at 8:00, playing whatever loud irritating thing is on the radio; turn off alarm; fall back asleep; wake up at 8:20 and frantically race to get to work. The new routine is: computer starts playing music (something nice, like Belle and Sebastian), the sound of which drifts into my room and gently awakens me; get up and wander into the other room, where the computer is; read blt (which has, ever so conveniently, already been loaded for me by the alarm program) for a bit, until I'm feeling somewhat more awake; go over to the stove and prepare some nice caffeinated beverage (a mocha made with Mexican hot chocolate is one of the divine things); drink this while reading the rest of blt; get dressed and all that mundane nonsense; walk to work.

It doesn't always go exactly like that, but still, the general trend is towards a much more pleasant morning. _
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11:04:14 AM, Monday 25 February 2002

Andrew Jackson is still my least favorite U.S. president. _
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03:40:01 PM, Sunday 24 February 2002

Power is out on the Annapolis St. John's campus. In case you're wondering why nobody from sjca.edu seems to be blogging, or AIMing, or doing anything computer. _
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08:21:53 PM, Saturday 23 February 2002

This is exactly what I wanted! Someone's done RSS feeds of the BBC News, by scraping the information from the HTML on the website. Nice. _
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05:53:36 PM, Friday 22 February 2002

Note: This article is being reprinted here as an example of what NOT to do with radioactive materials. _
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10:35:20 PM, Thursday 21 February 2002

Midday Thursday, looking at mail headers

One good way to produce a monstrosity is to design a format to be read by both humans and computers. _
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03:54:41 PM, Thursday 21 February 2002

I'm officially as much use as a Chocolate Teapot. Why do you bother to talk to me?
I'm also fattening if you choose to, uh, eat me.

Take the "Teapot" test today!

By the way, this has my vote for the best online personality test ever. _
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03:10:17 AM, Thursday 21 February 2002

Someone on Wiki has just given an English version of a Quine Program. A Quine, in this context, is a computer program that prints out the source code for itself. It's always sort of puzzled me how this can be possible, even when I read and more or less understand the programs themselves, but seeing it done this way made it really clear. It's like this:

Let the following text, enclosed in double quotes, be called Text A. (You can really ignore Text A. Just take note of the three dollar signs it contains.)

"Let the following text, enclosed in double quotes, be called Text A. (You can really ignore Text A. Just take note of the three dollar signs it contains.) $$$ Take pencil and paper, and write the following three things down, separated as paragraphs. (That's just boring copying. You needn't be interested in the text you're handling.) First, all of Text A that precedes the tree dollar signs. Second, the whole of Text A, enclosed in double quotes. Third, all of Text A that follows the three dollar signs. Now step back and try to interpret what you have just written."

Take pencil and paper, and write the following three things down, separated as paragraphs. (That's just boring copying. You needn't be interested in the text you're handling.) First, all of Text A that precedes the tree dollar signs. Second, the whole of Text A, enclosed in double quotes. Third, all of Text A that follows the three dollar signs. Now step back and try to interpret what you have just written. _
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02:22:20 PM, Wednesday 20 February 2002

I took one hit, and it was their error. _
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09:10:50 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

Kerne: Comments aren't working on teasmoke.net. _
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06:50:18 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

Okay, I can do an XML-and-filesystem object persistence system. It'll be less transparent[1] than ZODB, and probably have somewhat poorer performance (I hope not noticeably so), but it will also make objects easy to edit with an ordinary text editor, which is a big win. Also, since practically every programming language in the universe has an XML library, it should be fairly portable, which would be extremely winning. It'll be a bit slow to develop, though, so I'm putting it off till I've done a couple of other things. _
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05:58:02 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

In the past few years, South Park, Dancer In The Dark, and Moulin Rouge have all reinvented the musical. I believe that is all they have in common. _
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04:22:14 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

Old RPGers don't die, they just stop showing up. _
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04:16:40 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

OOPS is so exactly what I want--but it requires Python 2.2, and all I can count on is 2.0. Okay, so that's not an option.

If I absolutely have to write small, cheap, human-readable files (which it seems I do), then I might as well do something unspeakably brilliant: transparent, XML-based, filesystem-stored object persistence. The real trick will be getting it to work in a reasonable amount of time, but I don't think that'll be impossible, for our purposes.

I'm starting to see a real danger of creeping elegance. So far, though, I think I'm still sane. Need to do some hacking. _
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03:13:01 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

jwz explains the X clipboard. _
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01:55:08 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

Programmers learn pretty quickly that special cases are a Bad Thing in a programming language, and that What You Want is more abstraction and more consistency in the syntax, and from this point of view, it seems obvious that Perl is disasterously bad. But the difference is this: ordinarily, special cases are artifacts of what's happening behind the scenes in the computer. They're bad because you have to think about the machine rather than the problem. In Perl, inconsistencies and special cases are there, not to accomodate the machine, but to accomodate the human understanding. Sure, it's still possible to write deeply unreadable Perl, and it's harder to read Perl code if you're used to other languages, but if both the reader and the writer are reasonably competent, it's very expressive. It's idiomatic, rather than simply arcane. _
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12:39:38 PM, Tuesday 19 February 2002

Okay, here's how it is: in order to limit resource utilization, my blt will only tell you about the last 120 comments or postings. This means it goes back about a day. I'm trying to come up with something fiendishly clever to make it work right, but I'm not having a really fiendishly clever sort of a day. _
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05:08:34 PM, Monday 18 February 2002

test _
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05:04:37 PM, Monday 18 February 2002

Getting this blt thing worked out is giving me a much clearer idea of someof the constraints on wobble. I'm going to have to rethink some thingsabout how it works. In particular, I suspect it may not work to keep allthe information in a ZODB, at least not using FileStorage, because itwould require a larger file than the cgi scripts are allowed to access.

The robustness of bloglet comes from the fact that it writes everythingout to small, separate text files. This also causes the main problem withbloglet: all the data is trapped in the particular html layout its given,which makes it very hard to change, and it's broken up into a bunch ofobscurely named archives.

The question, then, is this: how do I give wobble the advantages ofbloglet without the problems, and without taking a million years tocode? The solution I'm thinking of is something like this: first, makeeach object take care of its own persistence. The big downside of this isthat it increases the complexity of the individual components, and makesit hard to change the persistence strategy. The upside is that I can thenmake each entry write its own separate XML file. This could be very niceindeed: a readable format, and lots of little files instead of one bigone. I don't think I've quite hit on the right thing yet, but I'm gettingcloser.

I am glad to say that I'll be able to keep my clever idea from a few daysago, even without the database. The idea is basically just a way to make aPython object present itself as a web page, and to let one access a nestedPython object through a path in an ordinary URL. It also makes somereformattings and things easy. In fact, now that I think about it, the newidea for how to store things might make the web access idea even better,because it would allow other tools to reach the same objects--acomment script in PHP, for example. But. It is late, and now I ambabbling. Tommorow, there are interesting things to be built. _
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07:11:15 AM, Monday 18 February 2002

You'll notice my blt is running a bit slowly. There is a reason for this. My web host places a limit on CGI scripts preventing them from writing files larger than one megabyte. The blog database was rapidly creeping up on this magic number. I didn't want to shut it down, so instead, I am now hosting the database on my home computer, and having blt connect to the database over the internet. My home connection is a bit slow to upload, so blt is taking a noticeable performance hit. For now, I figure it's better than nothing. I'm trying to figure out a better way to get around the restrictions. Probably I'll end up either storing the database in MySQL or getting permission from Pair to run a copy of ZEO (the database program I'm using) on the server. In the mean time, I hope it's not too maddeningly slow. _
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06:06:52 AM, Monday 18 February 2002

Test _
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05:47:39 AM, Monday 18 February 2002

I forget things faster than I can learn new ones. Experiences, too. Just vanishes off into nothing. It's rather remarkable. _
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05:57:19 AM, Sunday 17 February 2002

9 June 2000: Kid, we only got one question: ya ever been arrested? _
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05:37:09 AM, Sunday 17 February 2002

Fuck heroism. When we learn to sleep--that is when we shall truly become as gods. _
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04:06:20 AM, Sunday 17 February 2002

test. _
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03:24:06 AM, Sunday 17 February 2002

Mike's got disk space free for the taking. Yum! _
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03:13:48 AM, Sunday 17 February 2002

Okay, I've got something of a blt substitute rigged up. It doesn't know the right URLs for all the blogledytes, but there's an interface to tell it when it doesn't know. If you can figure out the interface and do it right, feel free. It's still not as good as Kerne's, but it works now. _
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01:20:37 AM, Sunday 17 February 2002

test _
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10:33:19 PM, Saturday 16 February 2002

test _
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10:16:41 PM, Saturday 16 February 2002

test _
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10:14:34 PM, Saturday 16 February 2002

Achtung: teasmoke.net is fucked up, and will be till Monday. There's nothing that can be done for now. _
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07:25:00 PM, Saturday 16 February 2002

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