February 2003

Horrible sore throat today. Considering the vast majority of my job requires talking, and I have a full day of important meetings tomorrow, that has meant staying home and doing a lot of typing.

"Ari & I" continues to amuse.

A couple of days ago I finished Travels With My Aunt, which someone who reads my web page recommended to me after I said I was looking for more funny British novels. It was decent and somewhat amusing — I’m a sucker for travel writing, fictional or not — but I don’t remember laughing once.

There were a couple of good passages at the end about how being scared of dying means you’re probably not really living. Which contradicts some things that Aaron was telling me recently about how just “getting through the day” is an accomplishment in itself. I don’t think I agree with Aaron.

The book, along with Jimmy K’s weblog, has me thinking about travel stories again. My last non-business trip was to Costa Rica, nearly a year ago now. It was a much-deserved two-week vacation, and I’d been so busy at work, I hadn’t planned a thing. Which was perfect.

I had expected to bounce around frenetically, to absorb the whole country in 15 days and jet back to Boston at the end, more worldly and relaxed and tan than ever before. But I ended up spending about half the time stuck in a tiny Caribbean village called Cahuita (population: 600) and hanging out with a bunch of Europeans.

On my first day in Cahuita, I met a Finnish boy named Antti who was covered in golf-ball-sized mosquito bites and who spoke freely about the large house near Helsinki that he would inherit when his parents die. He even carried a photo of it in his luggage.

Antti’s house.

Antti had just graduated from college, borrowed $7500 from his sister, and was planning to live on said money in Costa Rica for a year. Like me, he’d anticipated that he would hop around the country. But Cahuita sucked him in too. In fact, he ended up renting a house (on the beach, four rooms, $150/month) and sticking around for several months.

Python hacking continues apace. But it is 3am, the time for NyQuil and subsequent haze of sleep.

I’ve started coding in Python recently. It has a powerful set of class libraries which are easy to work with and so it’s handy for building quick, extensible prototypes. The Gtk/GNOME2 bindings are good, but not complete; actually the Mono bindings look more complete in some areas that are important to me, like GtkHTML.

But it’s so much nicer than writing with objects-in-C. The thought:typing ratio is a lot higher in a real object system with modern idioms. One difference, though, is that C is so messy that you force yourself to structure it heavily, and now I find myself being slightly sloppier in Python, because rigor just doesn’t feel as critical.

People bitch a lot about the semantic significance of whitespace in Python, and they’re right. Style and semantics should be decoupled. But if you can look beyond that, it’s a pretty good framework for light application development.

Desktop application integration would be so much easier if all the common tools were written in something like Python instead of C. Adding remote-control interfaces to things like your IM client, your file manager, etc. would be a breeze. Performance sensitive codepaths could be written in C if necessary.

In another plug, I’ve been enjoying the wallpapers from digital blasphemy. Two of my favorites are below:

 

It’s nearly 4am now, but considering I woke up at 7:30pm today, I may not be sleeping for a while. I’m not even sure what timezone waking up that late puts me in. Asia/Phnom_Penh, I think.

Speaking of which, my friend Jimmy K has been prancing around southeast Asia for the last couple months, and has been updating his web page as he goes.