- Mindlube Emacs
- uControl (now working with Panther)
- X-Chat Aqua
- Mac Python (now properly bundled by Apple)
- iJournal (what I'm making this posting with
I'm hacking away on my mac laptop, actually happy with the tools I'm using
(mostly) for the first time in a good long while. The tools that finally
made this possible:
IT'S OUT. Get it, it's the best one yet.
Quotient 0.7.0
We're making really good progress now, but we have GOT to stop these midnight releases.
Quotient 0.7.0
We're making really good progress now, but we have GOT to stop these midnight releases.
Timezones are more complicated than I had hoped, but less than I'd feared.
At least, some of them.
All the confusion stems from daylight savings time, which is, I might add, a terrible, terrible idea. US time and European time are just subtly different enough to be annoying, but they don't have anything seriously surprising in them.
Python's spiffy new datetime module is aware of these issues, and apparently wishes to avoid becoming embroiled in the hothouse world of temporal politics. Odd design choice, considering that the language was designed by a time traveler. While this is irritating from the point of view of someone who wants to just stuff some date objects into strings formatted appropriately for different time zones, I can see why. The amount of work you'd need to do to properly support every time zone is staggering.
For example, it turns out that israeli daylight savings switch-over time is set every year by the ministry of the interior, so you can't actually anticipate it in software, only retroactively apply the dates.
I have no idea how japanese, russian, african, or chinese dates work yet, and I'm not really looking forward to find out unless it's in the form of a robust
All the confusion stems from daylight savings time, which is, I might add, a terrible, terrible idea. US time and European time are just subtly different enough to be annoying, but they don't have anything seriously surprising in them.
Python's spiffy new datetime module is aware of these issues, and apparently wishes to avoid becoming embroiled in the hothouse world of temporal politics. Odd design choice, considering that the language was designed by a time traveler. While this is irritating from the point of view of someone who wants to just stuff some date objects into strings formatted appropriately for different time zones, I can see why. The amount of work you'd need to do to properly support every time zone is staggering.
For example, it turns out that israeli daylight savings switch-over time is set every year by the ministry of the interior, so you can't actually anticipate it in software, only retroactively apply the dates.
I have no idea how japanese, russian, african, or chinese dates work yet, and I'm not really looking forward to find out unless it's in the form of a robust
tzinfo implementation...
A few people have asked me for the web comics I read this week. Here is a
sampling:
This week I've been in New York City with the rest of the divmod developers, trying to get our product
(service, really) into an acceptable state to start selling it to
people.
Aside from some really unfortunate personal issues, this has been easily the best week of the last year. Every day I sat down to do some work, every day I got something quantifiable done. There are design issues, but there was no thrashing between completely different ways of doing things, only subtle corrections of possible problems.
Even the one really frightening thing that happened this week, a DB_RUNRECOVERY error which spuriously appeared when we attempted to open our database file, turned out to be a peculiarity in the interface of bsddb and not a systematic problem. JP and I managed to get the database re-opened and uncorrupt just by reading the mnet source code and tweaking some variables.
The two stars of this week were really "atop" (atomic transactional object persistence), and "nevow" (pronounced "nouveau", the next version of woven). After a week of intense work, we have a new UI and a new database: the new UI is almost to the point where the old one was, and the new database is far beyond the point where the old one was.
Despite this, there's a huge amount of work remaining, especially to rewrite our input handling and such. Still, I estimate at this point that I'll be keeping my email in this system in 2 weeks or less, and I'm far more sure of that estimate than I have been at any point in the past.
Aside from some really unfortunate personal issues, this has been easily the best week of the last year. Every day I sat down to do some work, every day I got something quantifiable done. There are design issues, but there was no thrashing between completely different ways of doing things, only subtle corrections of possible problems.
Even the one really frightening thing that happened this week, a DB_RUNRECOVERY error which spuriously appeared when we attempted to open our database file, turned out to be a peculiarity in the interface of bsddb and not a systematic problem. JP and I managed to get the database re-opened and uncorrupt just by reading the mnet source code and tweaking some variables.
The two stars of this week were really "atop" (atomic transactional object persistence), and "nevow" (pronounced "nouveau", the next version of woven). After a week of intense work, we have a new UI and a new database: the new UI is almost to the point where the old one was, and the new database is far beyond the point where the old one was.
Despite this, there's a huge amount of work remaining, especially to rewrite our input handling and such. Still, I estimate at this point that I'll be keeping my email in this system in 2 weeks or less, and I'm far more sure of that estimate than I have been at any point in the past.