This is the third list of books I’ve been reading. (One and two). I’m not sure what made me start doing this. Even writing a couple of sometimes sarcastic comments about each book can be hard work. It’s worth doing though, I reckon. To be accurate, the first two of these should have really been included in the last batch, but I forgot about them so they’re here instead. Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list:
If you’re unlucky you’ll have heard of unboxing videos, where someone laboriously unpacks their latest gadget purchase, appreciatively describing each piece of cardboard and polystyrene in excruciating detail, and videoing the whole thing for the ‘benefit’ of the world. Frequently the gadget in question seems to be made by Apple, because who else but a purchaser of Apple products would do such a thing? Anyway, not to be outdone, here is my re-boxing post and photograph.
There are two things I think are just plain wrong. Actually there are millions, but there are two I have in mind right now. The first is spaces instead of tab characters for indenting code. The second also involves spaces – excessive use of them like 1 + 1 = 2 when 1+1=2 is, to me, far more sensible. I don’t want to argue about either of these things, because a) this is a religious matter, i.e. I’m right and you’re wrong, and b) there’s no point, because you win anyway.
Why? Because in the interests of global harmony, code sharing, encouraging of contributions, etc, all my Python projects will now follow the PEP 8 guidelines. This doesn’t affect my contributions to other projects, since they’re always in the style required by that project (consistency always trumps religion), but it does mean that others can use and contribute to my stuff more easily, and hopefully in time I’ll get so used to seeing 1 + 1 = 2 that it won’t look stupid any more.
So, on the subject of PEP 8, a couple of tips I figured out along the way:
For no particular reason, other than that we have lots of snow, I’ve decided to write an irritating ‘top ten’ style list of music vaguely related to snow. This might be annoying, but I couldn’t just say it was snowing and leave it at that, because I did that last year. Don’t despair though, because I think it’s actually quite an interesting list, and I’ll try and make it even more interesting by rambling on about things as I go along. So, without any further ado, on with the list:
I wanted an easy way of using images from a Zenphoto gallery in MediaWiki pages, and it turned out there wasn’t one. In fact, I had trouble finding a hard way of doing it with satisfactory results. It’s easy enough to embed external images in a MediaWiki page, if you have your MediaWiki config set to allow it, but I wanted thumbnails that clicked through to the real image. Not so easy. Hence MWZenphoto – a very basic MediaWiki extension that lets you do just that by including a simple <zenphoto> tag in the wiki markup.
Something that occurred to me when I wrote my previous list of books I’d been reading is that I’d only got through 13 books in the whole year. I did a quick mental calculation on how many more years I might expect to live, and thus how many more books I might read EVER! It wasn’t many.
With that in mind the obvious course of action would be to select each and every precious book wisely. But no, because as before these are mostly books I found lying around the house rather than ones I chose. On the other hand, I did decide to write the list more frequently from now on, not least because I might drop dead at any moment and leave the world wondering what garbage I’d been filling my head with in my final days. So, without any further ado, on to the list:
In a way, it’s a sad day – I’ve harvested the last of the beetroot for this year. We’ve never grown them before, but they’ll definitely be here every year from now on. They’re really easy, very tasty and you get loads. As well as eating the root part (roasted is good) you can eat the leaves, which are great as salad leaves but even better cooked like spinach.
It’s less than a year since I wrote about how much I like Gallery. That’s still true, and I’m still running a couple of instances of it, but it’s now gone from this site. In the last year, Gallery has undergone a complete rewrite, with the new 3.0 in beta at the time of writing. In some ways, the rewrite seems like a good thing. It’s fair to say that 2.x was pretty bloated, and definitely ‘legacy code’. The new version is stripped down in many ways, PHP5 only, and built on top of the Kahona framework, making for a much cleaner codebase.
I inadvertently created a feedback loop where every blog post subscribed to via Planet Ciaran got an instant trackback/pingback as soon as it was posted. Here’s how:
Needless to say I’ve turned off the Linkback plugin until I can hack in a way to exclude that particular account. (Currently the plugin applies linkback logic globally, across the entire StatusNet installation.)
As a side issue, before anyone else asks why I bother with all the above anyway, there are two answers. One – because it’s there. Two, it provides useful ways of reading stuff. Planet Ciaran is subscribed to most of the stuff I read on a regular basis. The above setup gets me a) XMPP notifications, b) a web page to browse if I want to read it that way, and c) an aggregated sanitised Atom feed to subscribe to. If that doesn’t answer your question, and I suspect it probably doesn’t, then nothing will.
I wrote briefly about code_swarm last year – a tool to generate visualisations of a project’s commit history. Today, via Brenda Wallace, I found out about a new variation on the same theme – so new it hasn’t been released or even named yet. Apparently though the author, Andrew Caudwell, is planning to release the source in the very near future.
The following video, also courtesy of Brenda Wallace, shows the output generated from the StatusNet (formerly Laconica) git repository:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
I think this is really impressive stuff, and not just because I’m in it. There’s a better quality version on YouTube.
