“Alan Kay of Smalltalk fame, friend of Seymour Papert of Logo, champion of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) has become our new keynote speaker (EuroPython by transmission) and provider of new hope to many a would be Python learner. That’s right, Alan has adopted Python as his new pet language”
From: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2007/04/declassified-letter.html
Found this video randomly today…. This is why I do what I do. Computers are great.
Just an FYI, the NVidia Gigabit Forcedeth Ethernet driver in Linux uses the ethtool command to get and set the duplex rate and not the mii-tool like many other web pages erroneously state.
They have their very own Class A IP space assigned to them:
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IP_address_blocks
I’ve noticed one of the problems I have writing this blog is that I prefer to have finished thoughts when I write up something, or at least to have a good understanding of a problem I am working on before committing it to ‘paper’. Unfortunately, this doesn’t lead to many updates. I’ll try to break this habit a little. Recently I heard the term ‘Monkey Patching’ after one of the Seattle Patterns Group meetings, in relation to Ruby on Rails.
A Monkey-Patch (also called Monkey Patch, MonkeyPatch) is a way to extend or modify runtime code without altering the original source code for dynamic languages (e.g. Ruby and Python).
Today, reading a blog entry from Chad Fowler, the term came up again with a Python developer saying:
You can monkeypatch code in Python pretty easily, but we look down on it enough that we call it “monkeypatching”. In Ruby they call it “opening a class” and think it’s a cool feature. I will assert: we are right, they are wrong.
When I read that, I felt almost relieved, because I was thinking the same thing. I can see a limited use for it, but it seems like something you should only do in dire circumstances, that it would be detrimental to good software engineering practices. I can’t prove this, nor am I totally convinced, but Ruby and Ruby on Rails in particular seems to play a little bit fast and loose. I suppose this fits in with Agility, but there does seem to be a mental divide between Python and Ruby people (even though they are really quite close linguistically). To date, I’m much more in the Python camp, but I’ve been deploying Rails apps at work, and I’ll be delving more into Ruby as I go forward. I have heard rumors that Zope does Monkey Patching, and this convinces me even more. Zope has almost single handedly destroyed Python’s reputation at my place of work. Thanks Zope!
Today, I was searching Google for help installing Perl modules through CPAN using the default Solaris Perl. Sadly, my own blog was one of the search results, and it was no help. I guess this entry is going to make the situation even worse.
So I suppose I should put some useful information:
I’m sure if you cared enough and wanted to waste time, you could download the Sun Studio compiler just for your handful of Perl modules, or you could download the Sunfreeware package and use gcc, the compiler that God intended you to use. Your choice man. BTW, Sun, you suck.
Today I found out that Jabba the Hutt is a hermaphrodite.
A hermaphrodite is an organism that possesses both male and female sex organs during its life.
Umm, thanks Wikipedia?
Although I’ve had an Amazon Simple Storage Service account for awhile, I haven’t used it. For those of you who aren’t familiar with S3, Amazon has opened up their resources for everyday people to use. In this instance, you can use their servers as a place to dump your files online. Currently they charge $0.15 per gigabyte of storage used as well as a fee for the bandwidth to transfer it back and forth.
With this setup, they take care of the administration, backup, redundancy, troubleshooting, and the storage scales to whatever you need automatically. I’ve been searching for a good backup script so I can backup all the stuff I have running on this web-host, but most of them have been beta to this point or a pain to setup. Today I finally installed Brackup through CPAN, along with all the requisite Perl modules. I’ve already tested a backup and restore and it seems it will fit my needs well.
3dudesmojo.com. The three dudes have launched their new basecamp. Posting link for posterity and for Google to start crawling it. More to come as it becomes available.
Check it out.
The Canadian Parliament’s Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs has a document summarizing all the salient points on whether lobsters feel pain.
Good reading for a Saturday morning.