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The worst, and best weekend of my life.

This post is not about programming - so skip it if you want. It's about this weekend - or more particularly, about one of the - if not the most frightening moments of my adult life.

As anyone who reads my stuff knows - I have a beautiful almost four month old baby girl named Abigail. Since she's come into this world, I've found my hear grow a million times the size of what it was before, I've re-evaluated so much in my life - simply put, my life simply isn't the same.

And I wouldn't trade it for the world.

On saturday, as I was coming down the stairs from changing yet another atom-bomb of a diaper, one of our three cats was asleep on the stairs and I didn't see her. I stepped on the cat and immediately lost my balance - and my grip on Abby. Abby fell about four or five feet to the hardwood floor below me. She landed on her back/shoulders and head. Luckily, she started crying the exact second she hit her head and I picked her up within milliseconds it seems.

She was crying/moving/kicking - which up until I heard her cry this was the most frightening moment. The second she started crying, it was the best moment in my life. I wouldn't let her go - I just gripped her as tight as I could as she cried and my wife dialed 911.

Well, after 24 hours in infant ICU and her first MRI, Cat-Scan and X-Rays, we finally got to bring her back home on Sunday late-afternoon. It's funny - once everything calmed down in the hospital, she was already acting if nothing had happened, she was kicking and smiling and charming everyone in the unit. Seeing her strapped to a board, with a small infant-size neck brace around her neck - tubes and IVs and monitors all stuck in/on her was awful, but she smiled and kicked through it all (with a healthy dose of crying, but that's cause no one would let her eat).

At the end of it all - she got out of this with a small skull fracture, which should be nothing to worry about and a bump on the noggin. Her and Daddy now share something - head trauma. She's back to her old self, but I can honestly say I am not - I'm still nervous and overly careful. We've banned the feline occupants from the staircase and we've stayed home an extra day (per doctors orders) to spend more time with Abby.

Everyone kept telling me how these things happen - and that babies and children are resilient things. Thinking about it - I know they're right, given what I put my parents through and the number of ER visits we had to make when I was growing up.

Becoming a Dad - and now having her first real hurt come from my actions - really changes the way you see the world and how you measure what's important in life. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.

Python Magazine wish list: You always wanted to see your name in print!

So, part of the reason I've been line-dead for a bit is that in my off hours between work ramping up and baby-time is that I've been working on an article for the Python Magazine on threads/concurrency/the GIL/etc. It came out of the previous benchmark work. Luckily, it's largely done although I've got to do a tighter edit of it soon.

Brian Jones and Doug Hellmann put together a wishlist of articles - and Doug posted it on his blog over here. I really encourage people to contribute, and yes - they pay earth monies, which is always a bonus.

Personally? I'd love to see articles on deep internals of python - or even things around PyPy (specifically, how some of the C stuff was replaced with pure python).

PyCon Talk submissions, now open!

Per the PyCon blog, PyCon talk submissions are now open! I know I'm considering putting in something this year - you should too! The more the merrier.

Last year really set the bar high - and I still remember the packed Idomatic Python tutorial put on by David Goodger.

ASPN Gem: AST pretty-printer

Quote:

To me, it is totally unf*ckinbelievable that the standard Python compiler module does not come with a pretty-printer for the AST. Here is one.

Beautiful. You can see it here.

Python Community on LinkedIn

I just got word from Danny Adair via email about LinkedIn finally enabling groups and group creation again, ergo we now have a Python linked in Group!

The group membership is moderated, however here is a link to sign up for the group, your request will be queued and then later approved. I am going to go through my list of contacts on LinkedIn and trim out the latest Python round and notify people of the new group.

This is a much better solution than individual connections!

Freedom Languages

In my wanderings on the 'net over the last few weeks, I happened across a blog post/essay on "Freedom Languages" by Kevin Barnes which discusses the difference between dynamic "free" languages and static "safety" languages.

It is probably one of the most articulate articles I've read on the subject, and while it does touch on the technical aspects, it primarily focuses on the philosophical differences between the two camps.

He wisely avoids dead-panning both camps though, pointing out that both have their risks and benefits.

Interesting mental assertion: Dynamic languages empower the developer, Static languages empower the team.

Take a look, it's a good read.

Log parsing, Erlang, Python and the processing module

So, yesterday, Fredrik Lundh posted an article where he took a million-line log parser written in Erlang and went through the process of building an optimized version in python.

He did it with a single-threaded instance, multi-threaded and finally, he did it with the fork/exec process model. This experiment is a great read (especially as I might need to do some large-log processing soon) if just to see the iterations and the benchmark numbers.

Today, Doug Hellmann forwarded me this post - in which the author swaps out the threading module from the threaded parser example with the processing module - he too get very favorable results.

Working with the processing module off and on for the past month (around the benchmarks and some other projects) has led me to really enjoy it, and the article Doug did for Python Magazine did a great job covering it as well.

The processing module is really a great example of a module - the fact that it's API compatible with the threading module makes it a quick and easy drop-in for the threading module in many cases.

There has been some talk about making a "concurrency" PEP or something along those lines to explore getting a library into the stdlib in the python3k or earlier timeline. I've toyed with the idea of starting one for the processing module - given it "breaks" the "GIL limitation" and is simple enough of a drop in for many applications - and it can use multiple machines via the SyncManager.

It's something to think about - I don't know if the author is interested in it (no, I haven't asked - yet). I think I just might drop him an email today.

First issue of Python Magazine out - and Free.

As Doug's already pointed out - the first issue of Python Magazine is out and free!

I know a lot of people put a lot of work into this - the first issue will be free, but if you like it, subscribe!

I admit an amount of bias: I have been in the process of chewing on an article for the magazine, which goes to show that they really will take submissions from anyone (which is why you should contribute).

I highly recommend Doug Hellman's article on the GIL in this issue - while it happens to duplicate what I was working on he does a great job of discussing the issue and covering two of the alternatives.

Also, Brian's (one of the editors) blogged about it here.

Parallel programming environments: less is more

I saw this blog post from Intel's Timothy Mattson this morning - "Parallel programming environments: less is more", since this morning, slashdot's picked it up too.

Here's a link to the psychology paper cited in the post as well as a another related article "The Free Lunch is over"

I thought all of them were a good read - I think that to an extent, he makes a good argument for his point, and in the back of my mind I see the argument for one decent concurrent programming library for python (don't worry, I'm still working on the side project - albeit interrupted and slowly).