Thinking of doing some baking for someone with a Wii? How about cookies shaped like “Rabbids”?
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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IronPython 2.0 Released!
Hot on the heels of the release of Python 3.0 (a.k.a. “Python 3000”) comes the release of IronPython 2.0, the .NET implementation of the Python programming language. Some quick facts about IronPython:
- It runs on the .NET 2.0 SP1 redistributable
- It’s compatible with CPython 2.5 with a few differences
- It’s fast: it runs up to 1.8x faster than Python 2.5 on the standard PyStone benchmark
- It can call on most standard Python and all .NET libraries
If you want to get your paws on IronPython 2.0, head on over to its page on Microsoft’s CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site, where you can download the IronPython 2.0 installer and code samples.
I’ll be posting IronPython tutorials and sample code…watch this space!
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Cue the “Damien” Choir
I haven’t been posting much this week because I’ve been pouring heart, soul and brain cells into my first presentation at a Microsoft conference – TechDays 2008 in Calgary — which happens at 1 p.m. Mountain Time today. My regular posting should resume tomorrow or Friday at the latest.
The Empire’s still got some money to throw around, so every speaker gets two official button-down dress shirts with logos, one for each day of the conference. I have to admit I never thought I’d seen the day when I’d be wearing one of these:
My friend and co-worker John Bristowe keeps singing the “Damien” choir music from the The Omen every time I run into him with this shirt on.
Gojko Adzic points to this photo taken at QCon San Francisco 2008 by John Grae. It’s a slide featuring YAGNI, the Development Assistant, the programmer’s answer to “Clippit”, a.k.a. “Clippy”:
Photo by John Grae.
Click the photo to see its Flickr page.
YAGNI, short for “You Aren’t Gonna Need It” is a development maxim that suggests to programmers that they shouldn’t add features or functionality to applications that aren’t necessary at the moment, but might be in the future. YAGNI has the DRY (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”) Principle has a cousin and among its ancestors are Occam’s Razor and the KISS Principle (as in “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and not “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night (and Party Every Day”).
YAGNI, the Development Assistant comes from Bunk and Rambling, a blog by Darren Smith, where he put it forth as an IDE feature request back in May 2006, when he wrote:
While pair programming helps you to write high quality code in an efficient manner there are times that a pair of programmers will end up going off on a tangent and working on something that ultimately ends up not being necessary. To counter the unbridled enthusiasm that usually causes this to occur I give you Yagni, the Development Assistant.
YAGNI is meant for developers who believe strongly in test-driven development, so here’s how it would hypothetically pop up if you tried to create a class and started entering non-test methods first:
I’ll leave it to other people to argue over whether or not you always have to have unit tests.
Here’s another notice from YAGNI:
And finally, what I feel is YAGNI’s most important message – a warning that you’re in danger of embarking on a long, “let’s reinvent the wheel” project:
Since YAGNI’s not likely to appear in any IDE soon, you, your pair programming partner or whoever does code reviews with you will have to play its role for the foreseeable future.
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Python 3000 Released!
If there’s an Andre 3000 and a Python 3000,
why not a Guido 3000?
(This photo originally appeared in this entry.)
Python 3000, or Python 3.0 as it’s officially known, is out! If you want to get your paws on it right now, here’s its download page.
Python BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) and Google employee (Python’s his “50% project”) Guido van Rossum makes it very clear in What’s New in Python 3.0 that this is the first-ever intentionally backwards-incompatible Python and features more changes that in a typical Python release. Although this is the sort of thing that usually invites screams from anguished developers, I’m cool with it; although if found Python to be a very pleasurable language to work in, there’s a fair bit of junk that’s accumulated as both the language and the programming scene have evolved. Guido says: “after digesting the changes, you’ll find that Python really hasn’t changed all that much – by and large, we’re mostly fixing well-known annoyances and warts, and removing a lot of old cruft.” Sometimes you have to break backward compatibility to move forward.
I’m hoping to noodle with Python 3000 during the Christmas downtime, but if Python is your bread and butter, I suggest you start looking at the new version ASAP. They’re changes a-plenty that you might stumble on, but as Andre 3000 might say, “It’s all hood.”
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Cheap as in Crap
Just over a year ago, I quipped that Acer – the world’s most successful vendor of slightly sub-par but very cheap computer hardware – didn’t have any more sub-par vendors to buy after acquiring Gateway and the dreaded Packard Bell (which I prefer to call “Taco Bell” since both offer dirt cheap products yielding unpleasant results once you’ve consumed them). This was a good thing, I thought, as gathering all the crappy vendors into a single uber-crappy vendor makes them rather easy to avoid.
However, these are tough times, when “cheap and crappy” becomes attractive to customers. As if in answer to the credit crunch, the good news is that there’s been an announcement about a new netbook that promises to be sub-$100 (well, technically $99.95 is below $100).
The bad news? It’s being made by Coby.
If you’ve never heard of Coby, you probably don’t hang out in Chinatown, “grey market” electronic stores or Walmart. They’re a manufacturer of consumer electronics of dubious quality bearing a logo that I always found suspiciously similar to Sony’s. They’re the sort of electronics you buy when you need something decent-seeming to give away as prizes at a fundraiser or when your diet consists largely of Top Ramen. I’ve seen too many people burned by the false economy of a Coby purchase to have any faith in the company.
Still, my curiosity cannot help but be piqued. The availability of cheap, very portable, network-capable, almost-disposable computers that you’d pick up at places like discount stores, drug stores and perhaps even those kiosks in the middle of the aisles at your local shopping center is a potential game-changer for both everyday life and us developers. If you look at schoolyards and playgrounds, you’ll see that the Nintendo DS has changed kids’ recreation; what would a grown-up version like dirt-cheap netbooks do?
Here’s what can be gleaned from Inidymedia Arkansas’ article about Coby’s netbook:
- Expected release date: March 2009
- Expected models: PoquetMate-7” and PoquetMate-9” (“PoquetMate” is pronounced “pocket mate”), with 7- and 9-inch screens, respectively
- Processor: Something made by Loongson
I expect that at $100, it’ll run some flavour of Linux. I wonder if it’ll be another case of “Worse is Better” and beat the OLPC at its own game. I may end up picking up one of these suckers on a lark.
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I’m in Calgary Next Week
I’ll be in Calgary from Monday to Friday next week, catching up with my friend and co-worker John Bristowe (he’s Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist for Western Canada) and speaking at the Tech Days conference.
If you use (or are thinking of using) The Empire’s technologies, Tech Days is a pretty good place to get immersed. It’s a conference focused on learning about Microsoft tech on its target platforms – PC, web and phone – both current and upcoming. It’s also a chance for Microsoft developers to get together and network, and you leave the conference with a nice package of free stuff, including a full version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. (And just between you and me, if your company’s paying for it, Tech Days is also a good excuse to get a couple of paid days out of the office.)
In addition to the conference notes and reportage that you’ve come to expect from Global Nerdy and the accordion playing you’ve come to expect from me, I will be contributing in another way: I’m delivering the A Deep Dive into the ASP.NET Ajax Extensions presentation (it’s part of the web development track and taking place on Wednesday, December 10th at 1:00 p.m.. Here’s the abstract for the presentation:
The ASP.NET AJAX Extensions are the server half of ASP.NET AJAX. Aside from adding controls such as ScriptManager and UpdatePanel to the platform, they extend the ASMX model to support client-side callbacks and JSON serialization. In this session, we’ll explore ASP.NET AJAX on the server – both inside and out – in order to provide you with the knowledge you will need to exploit it to its fullest.
(If I had more time, I think I’d write my own abstract.)
I looked at the time slot I was given and went “uh-oh”. It’s one p.m., right after lunch, which is what people used to call the sexta hora in Latin. That means “sixth hour” and refers to the sixth hour of being awake, which is when people start to get a little bit sleepy. That’s where the word siesta comes from – it’s a bastardization of sexta hora. I’m going to have to make sure that I keep things interesting – I welcome that challenge.
See you in Calgary!