My cousin and I have been pushing ourselves to do more photography. I wanted more of a playground than my site here (which is really for the fam). If you’re following this at all, and are interested, you can find some of my latest work on my Flickr photostream.

BTW, if you’re thinking about putting some pics online, or you’re looking to get more involved in photography, Flickr is a great place to share and interact with many other people in the same shoes. Occasionally, you run into folks like Ed McGowan who have been taking pictures for about a year, but has incredible style. There’s a lot of great inspiration up there, and many of the “communities” seem to be very positive.

TTFN!

Did you see it? Yeah, that was the world growing just a little bit dimmer, as one of the most amazing people in the world passed away after a long struggle with cancer.

Kristen was a person of rare form. She had more compassion than should fit into one individual, and such a zest for life. The positive energy that flowed out of her was immense, and felt by everyone. She was incredibly smart, and had a way with people that few could match. One of her most amazing qualities, was that she was herself. There was no mask, and no frills. What you saw was who she was, and she was incredible. She was genuine.

I doubt there are many people in the world who could have put up the fight she did against cancer. I doubt that any of us are living life with half the vigor that she did while being treated. I doubt that any of us will forget her, that smile, or that laugh as she exits the world. We’ll miss you Kristen.

Go Jackets!

Charlie Nutter was kind enough to update pickjdk.sh to look in the right place for Mac OS X. Get it here.

So, in a previous post I said I’d likely chose git as my dvcs of choice. Well, it’s been almost 2 months and I find that while I’m very happy with the speed of git, it’s command line is more than I care to understand at the moment. I can get by with just a handful of commands, and on projects that are using git, I’ll do exactly that.

However, I’m really liking Bazaar, and the guys developing it and the plugins around it. QBzr is a spectacular front-end to Bazaar. I really enjoy being able to dig through the history, and it’s nice syntax highlighted views of source code. I also like the fact that I can write a plugin to extend the tool. I haven’t done that quite yet, but I hope to write one that’ll allow me to use a shorter syntax for referring to remote project urls. Plus, Jelmer is working integrating Bazaar with Mercurial (bzr-hg), and against git (bzr-git). So in the end, I can know one tool but work against any project of my choosing. If you haven’t taken the time to try out Bazaar, I highly recommend it.

Here’s a great article from Thomas Ptacek at Matasano entitled: Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong!

I’m not a web developer, but I certainly understand having a nuanced problem like that of web security. It’s interesting to see the plethora of ways in which you can screw it up hard.

This is one of the talks that was presented at PyCon 2009. Ned walks you through examining how much code your unit tests actually cover. As we become more “testing aware,” a portion of the community is really starting to focus on numbers. In particular, 100% test coverage, as though it were some panacea. Ned points out how that is a fallacy, and shows a couple of examples of how you can have 100% coverage and still be broken (it’s the paths through your code that matter… and it would be nearly impossible to test them all). Ned’s talk isn’t the only one out there about this sort of thing, which is a Good Thing. There needs to be a lot of discussion about this so that we don’t forget that once we get to 100%, we can still do better.

You can find a pdf version of the slides here: http://us.pycon.org/media/2009/talkdata/PyCon2009/026/coverage.pdf

Just did a quick hack to make Python use native Mach semaphores for the GIL instead of the mutex/condition variable pair, and got sizable speed up (13%) on David Beazley’s thread test from his presentation (I have 4 cores instead of 2 though). Guess I need to create a patch to add support for it.