jessenoller.com

Welcome to home ownership.

I've mentioned this before - on Jan 4th, I ended up closing on my first house. The primary driving force of course being my now nearly seven month old daughter, the secondary driving force is well - owning a house.

Both my wife and I were excited, ecstatic even. I mean, it's not a palatial mansion by any stretch - but it was ours.

Then, things went sideways. After closing, after we start painting - we find a problem. A big, glaring problem. That problem happens to be a leaking toilet - that has apparently been leaking for some time (measured in potentially years) into the sub flooring. This means all the wood beneath the tile floor under the toilet it rotten and moldy, and that dampness and mold may have spread to the rest of the flooring and areas.

We found this pulling the toilet to put in a new one - now, instead of a cheap plop-in-a-new-toilet, we're staring down the barrel of a much larger "strip to the walls due to rot and mold" deal. We can't move in, and we didn't even imagine this would happen.

Rotten wood, mold. The works. And no, it's not covered, and it is no ones responsibility (or rather, no one is liable). Nope, we just get left holding the bag. The inspector found a tangental issue: but not the primary issue, so no one was technically the wiser.

Stupid toilets. From now on I'm only buying houses without running water, in non-flood plains in areas with no termites. Also the house will be made of stone.

Pycon: PyCon 2008 Registration Open!

I forgot to post about the fact pycon registration is open! Woop woop. I have every intention of going - but I might get sandbagged by some recent serious setbacks with the new house¹.
Pycon: PyCon 2008 Registration Open!: "Registration"

1. if you're buying: pull the place apart and get the most anal inspector ever. [↩]

January issue of Python Magazine now available for download

Per Doug H: January issue of Python Magazine now available for download. I enjoy this periodical: You should as well.

Brett Cannon: What info would help you work on the Python core?

Brett's looking for information and feedback about people want to know about getting involved in python-core development, or tricks of the trade from existing core developers. You should go help him out - it can only make the stuff he's putting together for the community better.

Back to deal with the sick infant.

You know you’re spending too much time on the ‘net when…

You accidentally start typing "False" as Fail - and don't notice it until some stupid unit test bombs out:


ERROR: test_someCoolMethod (__main__.TestScenarios)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "mysillytests.py", line 83, in test_someCoolMethod
self.assertEqual(resp, Fail)
NameError: global name 'Fail' is not defined


I need to make two knew types: Fail and Win. Too bad the bool class can't be sub classed. I think a win and fail type would make things so much better:


If var is Fail:
...
elif var is Win:
...

if var is not Win:


Maybe I need stop writing unit tests and go to bed.

Edit to add: Doug helped me out:

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct 5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> __builtins__.Fail=False
>>> __builtins__.Win=True
>>>
>>> x = Win
>>> y = Fail
>>>
>>> not x
False
>>> not y
True
>>> y is Win
False
>>> x is Win
True
>>>


Now all I have to do is add this to my sitecustomize.py and really trip up my teammates.

Helping Doug out: What python tools can’t you live without?

Doug H. posted that he's working on a new series of articles around python development tools (everything from testing to syntax) to run in Python Magazine - I know he'll do a great job, so why don't you head over there and give him some feedback.

Given this is coming hot on the heels of my analyzer post - I'm also interested to hear what people can't live without. (Noting of course there's a huge contingency of iPython people out there).

My personal list as of late is:

• Texmate
• Eclipse+Pydev (for bigger projects)
• Pychecker (with pylint coming up behind)
• PythonTidy
• Virtualenv

Brett Cannon: Transitioning from 2.6 to 3.0 is beginning to solidify

Brett's put up a post about the details around the upcoming transition methods to py3k - Brett Cannon: Transitioning from 2.6 to 3.0 is beginning to solidify

You should take a look - of special note is that the -3 flag will not replicate 2to3 functionality, which means you will still need to run 2to3 over your code to make it 3k happy-happy.

Now with Comments (Disqus is made of Django)

So, my previous post netted a little under 300 page views - but no comments (up until an hour or so ago). Why? Because I suffered from an epic Fail.

I use a system called Disqus for the comments here - I got tired of dealing with the absolutely insane amount of spam comments not being trapped by Akismet. A little while ago, I was tinkering with the options for the blog integration and checked the box "all anonymous comments must be approved/moderated". This is where I failed.

Wordpress, when a comment enters - will send you an email. I've never quite realized how much I rely on that little fact. In reality, I had a bunch of comments spread across a few posts to approve, and didn't know it.

So, a few hundred hits and no comments - I went digging for the unapproved comments (disqus.com->dashboard->unapproved) and sure enough, there all the posts are.

Rather than focus on my fail - I'd like to point out that using Disqus is a breeze, integration was simple (but may break with some wordpress themes) they have a nice API and the entire thing is built with Django!

For people looking for comment/discussion systems, and looking to dodge the spam problem, I highly recommend them.

Now I just want email notification on all comments. I found the email on all comments setting, in your profile settings.

Do you use an python code analyzer?

I've got a question out there for everyone doing Python hacking - does your normal coding cycle include an analysis tool ala Pylint/PyChecker/PyFlakes?

Do you just rely on intelligence in your IDE of choise (Wing, Komodo, Eclipse+PyDev)?

Do you feel the need for the analyzers, or do you "discard" them in favor of writing unit tests/doctests first (personally I don't find the two exclude one another) to verify functionality over "correctness".

Which (if any) do you prefer? Do you setup automatic check-in triggers?

Or, do you really take the conformity-to-style-and-rules-correctness to a higher level and auto-pipe checked in code through a PythonTidy?

The Myth of Creativity

Another good read:The Myth of Creativity from discipline and punish. I completely agree with his assertions on creativity.
An excellent quote is this:

It's not just artists that fall for this poetry. The same error is quite common among developers too. Here it takes the form of "expressive power". Here again the same flawed thinking makes the same twists and turns and the end result is the same: the idea that a programming language ought to have as few constraints as possible to allow the developer to express her creativity to the utmost.

Creativity without constraint is line noise.