Arc v' October 2002

Today I started writing up user documentation for the project I'm wrapping up. It's the first time I've used reStructuredText, and I must say that I'm liking it. As far as structured text markup languages go, it's pretty comprehensive and not *too* obtrusive. It's definitely good enough for most technical documentation needs, and is in fact a PEP Formatting Standard (see also PEP 12 Source). Other items of interest, particularly to Python programmers, are:

• PEP 256 "Docstring Processing System Framework" (src)
• PEP 257 "Docstring Conventions" (src)
• PEP 258 "Docutils Design Specification" (src)

I include the source links to show the relative cleanliness of the markup, which is the point of all Structured Text formats.

sigh I thought I'd have more to say, but I'm really too tired. So - quick wrap up: I was pretty productive with this stuff right off the bat. Nice.

For "Zope", there is a proposal to integrate reStructuredText into Zope, hopefully for 2.7.

Big lovely flakes are falling outside, and it's really beautiful from up here.

It's been an odd week, and we're only two days into it. It would have been my Grandpa's birthday on Monday, and I went out to see my Grandma and ended up spending the night at her house. I slept in a room that my Grandpa finished when my dad had to move back home after my mother died. The cycle was strange. I was also given a wooden plaque of sorts that was made out of my Dad's first wedding invitation. It gives me two good things that I've never had before: a picture of my dad with a mustache, and a picture of my real mom who was very pretty (they were both in their early twenties in the photo. And I've never seen my dad with a mustache. Priceless).

The snow is getting heavier. I doubt this storm will bring any real accumulation, and ski season is still a couple of weeks off yet. But this is already a better start than last year - hopefully the snow really picks up (especially in the mountains) in November. And I've been waiting to see what a snowstorm would look like from up here.

Helmut Lang has a new fragrance out, Cuirion Pour Homme. Should I:

1. Bug the local Norstroms to get some sample packs in (even though they stopped carrying HL fragrances) and then order online?
2. Just order online and take my chances that the fragrance will wear well on me?
3. Get off my ass and onto a Jet Blue red-eye, find a cheap NYC hotel (I miss my old money), and pay a visit to the HL Parfumerie?

I want to do the third option. Delta had a great SLC-JFK web fare for this past weekend ($178 round trip) that I came so close to taking. But, Ski Season is approaching. I'm torn between my two expensive loves, skiing and NYC... I suppose I should get to work and pray for more money to happen soon.

From Chris McDonough's Meta-Whine:

With only few shining exceptions, these offers almost never pan out and the thing that they offered to do never actually gets done. It's as if people believe that by offering to do something, they've actually done it. [Chris McDonough]

I have to plead guilty to this, with the most recent promises being a release of "FDoc". I learned my lesson long ago - fix it if I can, otherwise, stay quiet. There is rarely enough time in the day to do real work and Open Source work, so why promise? I don't live up to this all the time, but I do try.

Speaking of which - it's time to get sparkly clean, shaven, and head to the office. I have a big deadline this week, and I'm sure there are plenty of new projects waiting to attack.

I've been asked recently about this FDoc project I keep mentioning. Today, I wrote a new document about it.

• Regarding FDoc -- this is the new document, and goes over some of the design ideas as and after they've been put into use.
• Compound Zope Documents -- this is an older document, written a few months ago during some of the initial coding of the base framework and a default end-user implementation.

We Lost a Good One.

Burningbird observes:

We Lost a Good One. Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife and daughter and three staff members and two pilots died in a plane crash today. Their deaths are horribly tragic and my sympathies go out to their families and friends. But in these times,...

and, pointedly,

From a purely political perspective, this tragedy puts the Democratic control of the Senate at risk. If the Republicans win control of the Senate, and they maintain control of the House, Bush will have unfettered accessto as much power as he wants, to use as he wants. It will be next to impossible to control him and his cabinet at this point.

We couldn't agree more.  The current situation is frightening, and looks to get more so before it gets better.

[The Boulder Inquisition ...]

If this turns out to be true, it will be very interesting: Journaling File System Layer to appear in Mac OS X 10.2.2.

The odd thing is that this is appearing on a dot-dot release. Was this a feature that was meant for 10.2.0 but didn't make the cut? Note that Journaling, which adds a 10-15% performance hit to the operating system, is turned off by default.

Of real interest - Apple did bring in Dominic Giampaolo a while ago. Giampaolo wrote BeOS's journaled BFS file system. With luck, more BFS features will find their way into Mac OS X, allowing OS X to beat Microsoft's Longhorn/Yukon projects to market.

Milo Shell, my grandfather who helped raised me as a baby when my mother died, passed away peacefully during the night.

My Grandfather, Milo L. Shell, a pacific theater World War II veteran (seen here at my cousin's wedding in August) is dying. He's basically in a morphine coma as his body shuts down from cancers - much more than we knew about. We almost lost him a couple of years ago to pancreatic problems, which was one of the things that prompted me to move back home - I knew it was going to be a time to be closer to family. We're a small one - the grandkids are me, my two younger brothers, and my cousin (his only granddaughter). It was marvelous that he was able to be there to give her away at their wedding.

Looking for a new home? A condo on the 90th floor of the Trump World Tower is only $17 Million. Approximately one square mile one mile worth of square feet (5,472 or so), AND maids quarters!

Down on the lowly 20th floor, a studio unit about 80 square feet larger than mine is only $600,000.

Glancing through MacCentral, I came across iStorm - a LAN based document collaboration tool for "Mac OS X". For $20 two people can collaborate, chat, share, etc. Site licenses for more concurrent users are also available.

iStorm uses Rendezvous for easy document sharing on a LAN, and includes chat functionality for brainstorming / arguing over document sharing. An upcoming version includes a blackboard with integrated TeX editing for scientific document collaboration (or for some of us to just use the pretty little symbols).

It looks really cool. I would like to throw this up as a shell around OmniOutliner documents, but I'll take what they give me now.

I'm also checking out TinderBox, but it would take collaborative editing to convince me to move outside the small, fast, comfortable world of OmniOutliner.

I was trying to ascertain the state of "Python" 2.3 today, and PEP 283 offered up an interesting list of what is already in for 2.3, and a fairly long list of "planned features". What's in? Two new types - booleans and sets!. A fundamental datetime type or interface may make the release as well. A planned possible feature is an Iterator Tools module featuring "goodies from SML and Haskell".

I've been using Python for over six years now (it's hard to believe it's been that long!), and it's been interesting to watch the language grow since 1.3. A nice thing about Python's growth is that it's been fairly smart - as it picks up new features, it also simplifies itself. A lot of the old confusions / problems are gone or going away, and helpful features have popped up -- the type/class dichotomy is on its way out (it's interesting to see the prototype 'bool' type written up in Python by subclassing from 'int' - see PEP 285); booleans are coming in (I've always liked the way Python has treated true/false values, but it's nice to have actual 'True' and 'False' objects, and the built in 'bool' constructor); much of the old 'string' module has become methods on the 'string' type, removing the oddities of having a bunch of procedures to operate on a very common object in an object-oriented language; there are more unifications in expressions (the 'in' operator can now be used to search for substrings in a string: if 'this' in 'there was this thing..': in place of if 'there was this thing..'.find('this') > -1:; this also applies for dictionary keys: 'somekey' in mydict in place of mydict.has_key('somekey')); iterators are offered throughout the language now, sometimes offering shortcuts for common operations (such as reading individual lines from a file), and keeping resource use down for others; and we finally have nested scopes. Not to mention the little delights like Generators and List Comprehensions.

Without going into too much details, tonight after mad birthday celebrations (where I spent too much time being tired drunk instead of too-much-dancing drunk), I came home to an email from Apple concerning the .Mac outages. Their claim, which I believe, is that there have been equipment problems. They claim the vendor has not been able to promise no more problems in the future, and work is underway to install new equipment.

Hopefully this works out well for them and for us subscribers, and it's nice to be notified. In the past, when the service was free, I didn't mind outages and interruptions, but as web services get integrated more and more into desktop applications and environments, service availability is going to be a critical issue. Hopefully having paying subscribers will offset the high cost of service availability. Large scale web services like .Mac, whatever Microsoft .NET My Services morphs into, and other large offerings require more than just a single web server sitting in California. Backup, caching, and location issues abound for service providers. Even Userland's "Radio" servers have had problems in the past (but have run smoothly now for months). Other services, like LiveJournal have also had availability issues, and in fact LiveJournal is closed to free accounts that don't come in off of a referral.

There are some other weblogs about Web Service Strategies that have better details than I can offer about the aspects of web services beyond SOAP, REST, or however the basic protocal is spelled for you.

There is no end to my joy over the fact that I am going to be doing some subset of dining, dancing, or drinking tonight while G.W.Bush is spouting off his short alliterative repetitive phrases over why the United States is blessed above all other nations to take pre-emptive strikes against other nations.

Gulf War II, the Iraqi Boogaloo

This is going to end badly. But, say it enough times...

There are still occasional, but very annoying, outages and/or hiccups in Apple's .Mac system. I hope it's just a side effect of the millions of semi-idle accounts that are set to expire in a week or two. Now that I and many others are paying for the service, I expect better continuity of service - especially now that I use many of the offerings. From Backup to iSync, email to iDisk, .Mac is becoming a significant piece of my Macintosh experience. Hiccups affect that experience negatively.

This is one of the most important aspects of the interconnected web services based world - if a piece of the chain goes down, the ripple effect can be significant.

Since many of the .Mac services are in a transition phase from the simpler free iTools offerings to the new for-pay integrated .Mac offerings, some hiccups are understandable. But the issues - whatever they may be - better be solved soon.

I still have to promise that part 2, about the web applications on .Mac, is coming soon.

My heart keeps switching in between two songs - "Oh Happy Day", and Jim O'Rourke's "Happy Holidays" (with the opening lines of "I'm going to a place where the women have nothing on but the radio turned up to 10"). Hopefully this is a good sign of Endless Winter.

I turned on the radiators for the first time last night in this apartment. Now to get used to sleeping to the occasional thonks and clinks and clacks and hisses. Oh happy day! Winter is Coming! (yes, I used the blink tag there for the first time in YEARS, if not ever. The situation demands it. Besides, who will see it blinking anyways?).