Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Quote of the day

“Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.”

CVS, Windows and binary files

Today I’ve been bitten again by how CVS handles binary files under Windows. When you ever see a binary file being corrupted when you update your local repository on a Windows machine you should mark the file as binary, delete it locally and re-update. There are two ways to do it:

• cvs add -kb filename when you add the file initially to the project
• cvs admin -kb filename after the fact

Set goals

Recently I’ve read tons of books on how to become more effective, how to achieve more. They don’t always agree on the answer but there’s one thing they all agree: you have to set goals. Goals should be SMART. They should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Results oriented
• Time-bound

“Our job, as writers, is to live the most fascinating life we can muster. We have to be willing to have the experiences that others are afraid to pursue. Then, we pay back the world for letting us have these experiences by sharing them, in writing. . That’s the deal.” http://www.rushkoff.com/blog.html

If you program in Python, use pychecker. Because of the way Python works it can only detect some problems in the code when this code is executed. This is not very good, because you can have bugs hidden in your code for a long time and they might show up at the worst time. Pychecker is a static analysis program which will catch many of those problems just by analyzing the source code. The good part is that it really works. I’ve ran it on my little script and it detected few bugs. They were easy to fix but apparently not so easy to spot. I love this kind of tools: tools that compensate for the fact that humans are lazy and easily distracted. Those are the kinds of bugs that pychecker finds (according to the documentation):

• No global found (e.g., using a module without importing it)
• Passing the wrong number of parameters to functions/methods/constructors
• Passing the wrong number of parameters to builtin functions & methods
• Using format strings that don’t match arguments
• Using class methods and attributes that don’t exist
• Changing signature when overriding a method
• Redefining a function/class/method in the same scope
• Using a variable before setting it
• self is not the first parameter defined for a method
• Unused globals and locals (module or variable)
• Unused function/method arguments (can ignore self)
• No doc strings in modules, classes, functions, and methods

One note: since I use Windows I had to modify pychecker.bat to put quotes around the full path to python.exe (since it contained spaces and cmd.exe doesn’t like that). I also copied pychecker.bat to a dir in my %PATH% so that I don’t have to type the full path to execute it.

Blogging is a seductive idea, so many people try it. It’s also a lot of work, so many people stop after a week or two. I’ve seen that already a few times. So if you’re starting a blog, remember: blogging is a marathong, not a sprint. Plan for that.

Can you believe it? K&R classic on C is on-line. Go and read it as I did so many years ago.

What do they do again? They evolve their service yet another time, this time providing Gold Box (look in the right-upper corner). The idea itself is neat but not revolutionary. But Amazon is great because it adds those neat ideas all the time and they add up in the end to one of the best e-commerce sites on the planet. Seth Godin also noticed Gold Box.

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero. I will never be rich, so I have chosen to crank down my desires. The bureaucracy cannot take anything from me, because there is nothing to take”   http://www.d-n-i.net/FCS_Folder/comments/c199.htm

Just finished reading half of the book “Opening Xbox”. Interestingly all the characters from “Renegades of the empire” are briefly mentioned (since they did DirectX, technology that was later used in Xbox). But the main thing I got from the book is that right know there are many people working on things that later become a history. There are people and technologies about whom books will be written, just like a book has been written about Xbox, DirectX or eBay. The question is: are you one of those people? Are you making the history? If not, why not?