I've started playing around with minor projects in my personal launchpad space, partially to try out bzr.

Most recently I wrote a hack, temporarily named "pyexport", which allows you to control the names which your library module namespaces export to application code.

So far, I've implemented a few features.

1. export.alias(), which registers an alias for a method in another module that will not be imported until that module is imported,
2. export.explicitly(), a convenience function which makes cooperating with __all__ easy
3. export.internal(), which marks a module as "internal", and warns any application code (code outside the package which defines the module) which tries to import it
4. export.restrict(), a method which prevents "leakage" of extraneous imported or private names - for example, if you have a module 'foo' which imports 'sys', you can normally do 'from foo import sys' in Python and get a result.
   
5. export.singleton(), which replaces the calling module with a proxy that shares a namespace between the given singleton and the module itself.
   

It'll be some work to turn this rough prototype into something really usable for a large system like Twisted; at the very least it will need to be rebuilt test-first and integrated with the pydoctor and pydoc documentation tools.  Let me know what you think, and if I should pursue it!

I finally hit the limit of my flickr account; I've posted 200 pictures, and so, starting from the beginning of my photo stream, some of them are going to start disappearing.

I have about 100 more pictures to post, but I've been intentionally keeping my account free, because I'm not sure if it's actually worth my time (or money) to use the features of a "pro" account if nobody is really listening.

So I'm wondering, are there 20 people out there — one for each of the dollars it would take to upgrade my account — who actually care about what I'm posting on flickr?  No need to get effusive, just ping me in the comments (or email) to let me know I should upgrade and keep posting pictures.

Tycho says:

More than anything else, I think it was installing Vista that made me hate PC gaming. The constant, system-level interruptions, the impaired compatibility, and most of all the savage kick to my framerate's exposed groin made me wonder what precisely in the fucking fuck I was doing screwing around with this onyx monolith. I knew I was just going to have to upgrade eventually (no), and I wanted to see if there was anything to this DirectX 10 thing (no), and I wanted to see what the Windows version of Live was like (a warcrime) so I bit the bullet. I shouldn't have. It was a bullet! That should have been my first clue.

Is this Microsoft's secret strategy with Vista?  To make everyone by an Xbox because they're sucking the life out of the PC ecosystem?  It hadn't yet occurred to me that Vista was supposed to be bad.

Ying and I had been planning to have our wedding on the 11th anniversary of our first date: on march 15th, 2008.  I've told a few people about our plans, although invitations haven't gone out yet.

However, we're going to have to delay our plans.  In addition to the usual logistical issues and scheduling conflicts, one thing we didn't count on was that planners tend to be exceptionally busy during the holiday season and couldn't really return our calls.

I'll let you all know as soon as I can when the new date is, but we don't want to set one until we're sure that we can actually make sure the plans will happen on time.  I appreciate all the offers of help — and believe me, we will call all of you with favors when the time comes — but we can't really wait any faster, no matter how much help we have ;).

The good news is that in 2015 we will have a good distributed operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Firefox and JavaScript.