Unquiet Desperation

I turned 39 on Friday, and in keeping with the tradition of frustrating the people who wanted to get me something, I told them I had no idea what I wanted for my birthday. It all worked out for the best. Here, in no particular order, is the rundown of birthday loot.

Clothes: What was once the bane of my childish existence was a boon this year. I have become one of those guys who wears whatever he has until it is falling apart, and the end result is a rather shabby-looking fellow staring back in the mirror. My wife, fresh from having pieces of herself removed during surgery last week, decided that it was time to freshen up my look somewhat. A new hoodie, t-shirts, a polo, and a new oxford were welcome sights, as was the gift card she gave me to go pick out more. With luck, I’ll stop looking like a refugee from 2001 this year.

Popcorn: My kids visited my favorite chocolate shop (The Chocolate Emporium) and bought me a bag of their chocolate-covered popcorn. While it’s a small setback for my diet, it is a welcome addition to my lunch this week.

Legos: My four year-old son gave me three small boxes with his Legos in them, saying that he wanted to give me his favorite toys. He also said that he hoped I’d share with him. Which, of course, I shall.

The B-Spot: My in-laws gave me a give card to Michael Symon’s B-Spot restaurant, which is my current favorite place to grab a burger and beer. Highly recommended. I’m saving it for a place to take my wife after she;s fully recovered.

I also received some birthday cash, and with that, I treated myself to some fiction I’ve been waiting to pick up:

- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 2: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis
- The Hidden Family by Charles Stross (Book 2 of The Merchant Princes)
- The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross (Book 3 of The Merchant Princes)

For myself, I picked up the latest MacHeist bundle. I’m using MacJournal from that bundle to write this post, and while I’m not sure that I love it, is does have some good points. I think I like vim better.

Finally, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and bought a monthly subscription to Thomas Gideon’s Commandline Podcast. The man is my tech news aggregator, after all. It’s important to support content creators, and Thomas is one of the best.

Good morning, my people…

• My apologies for missing my TRICKSTERS update for the last two weeks. Between a big event last Thursday and my wife’s operation this week, I’ve just not had the energy to put out a good episode. I’ve written three lousy episodes, but as they are sub-par, I’m going to hold on to them and try to magically turn them into something decent for next week.
• My wife (Cathy) is recovering from he gall bladder surgery nicely…each day is a little better than the last. Thanks to everyone who has sent prayers, luck, and good wishes. She really does appreciate it, as do I.
• Thanks to everyone who is wishing me a happy birthday today.   In case I do not get to thank you personally, know that it is greatly appreciated.
• Want to know what I was up to in Atlanta? My interview about PyCon is now available at The Command Line podcast. 
• My review of Charles Stross’s Halting State is up on The Secret Lair.
• We’ve announced the winner of the Name Overlord Johnson’s Laptop contest.
• I am once again dabbling in Second Life. You can blame Sam Chupp for this.  I am known there as Brand MacIntyre…feel look me up. I am a lonely soul there, knowing no one.

Hacked. Went to two talks on Mercurial. Hacked. Ate. Flew Home. Unpacked. Tired. Wrap-up later this week.

Good night.

Today was made of twenty-four karat win.

• We had three excellent keynotes, but the one that stood out was Mark Shuttleworth’s discussion of Cadence, Quality, and Design, in which he discussed the discipline of development on a timed schedule, and how it has helped the Ubuntu teams.
• David Beazley’s Understanding the Python GIL was as crunchy as I’d hoped. He did a series of tests on how the Global Interpreter Lock acts when dealing with threads on a single or and then on multicore machines. It was outstanding.
• Catherine Devlin gave a talk about how to build command-line interpreters using cmd and cmd2, then as a bonus explained how SQLPython can make your life better. A commandline shell that allows you to interface with Oracle, MySQL, or PostGRes as if you were in a Unix shell?  Yes please!¹
• C. Titus Brown’s discussion of implementing different continuous integration packages was as entertaining as could be, and brought home several good points (mostly, just use Hudson. Really.).
• Finally, Ned Batchelder demystified several layers of confusion during his talk on Tests and Testability.  I’m looking forward to playing around with his ideas at work this week.

I’m beat. There’s one more day of talks, then I’m on my way back home. Not sure when I’ll be able to get my Day Five post up, but I’ll try to do it before I fly out.

Thanks for reading!

1. This talk completely blew me away, and I’m wondering if she accepts sacrifices or tribute.[back]

Today was the first official day of the conference, and it was packed. The started off with a carb-filled wonderland of treats (croissants, various breads and cakes) and coffee leading into the three keynotes.

1. Van Lindberg formally opened the convention.
2. Steve Holden¹ gave an overview of what’s new at the Python Software Foundation, and what’s coming down the pike. THere was a strong emphasis on diversity as a key goal for the next year. These was also discussion about the possible creation of an Associate membership in the PSF wheere people could donate money and become a member. Nothing definitive on the latter yet, but it is under consideration.
3. Finally, Guido van Rossum put the twitterstream of #pycon tweets on the screen behind him and took questions from the stream for about 40 minutes. Of special note was his comment on Django vs. Turbogears (“Django. Sorry, Turbogears guys.”), Django in general (“Django sucks. But they all suck.”) and vim vs. emacs. (“I use emacs. I also use vim. I’m not very good at either.”)  In all fairness, it was hard to delve deeply into any one topic, so discussion was light and all in good fun.

After a short coffee break the various tracks started up. While everyone seemed to be getting something out the talks they attended, my personal experience was that it was rather it and miss. The single outstanding talk was an exploration of the Python Dictionary, explaining how it allocates memory, resizes itself, and assigns addresses in RAM. It sounds dry but Brandon Craig Rhodes did an excellent job, and was easily the best speaker of the my day. A close second was Grig Gheorghiu’s discussion of RESTful web services and how to construct them using restish.

The day finished off with a set of lightning talks, the highlights of which were Greg Wilson’s request for articles for his next book entitled Beautiful Software Architecture, Ned Batchelder’s report on recent changes to coverage.py, and David Huggins-Daines’s demonstration of PocketSphinx, a speech recognition engine which will transcribe .wav formatted audio to text.

By then end of the day, most of the folks I was hanging with were beat, so we split up and grabbed dinner. Some of us walked back to my hotel and hacked on code for two or three hours, which was fun. I haven’t been able to hack with a team since I left Mahalo, and I do miss it.

Tomorrow looks to be another full day. Check in late in the evening for a recap of Day 4.

1. Chairman of the Python Software Foundation[back]