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Archive for June 2007
June 25th, 2007
Took the family to Picnic Island in Honey Harbour for a couple of days camping, canoing, and generally being as far away as possible from the office. When the office is in your bedroom, I’m finding you have to physically leave the house to relax.
Picnic Island is a nice quiet campground – mostly trailers and an older clientèle, I’d guess. A pleasant lack of the loud parties that have marred some of our camping trips.
I’m finding that getting exercise is becoming addictive – canoing, hiking and getting out on my bike are a great way to burn off stress, and the more exercise I get the more I seem to want.
Posted in travel | No Comments »
June 19th, 2007
Just finished this book by Michael Ungar. His thesis is that despite the fact that Canadian children are safer than they’ve been at any time in history, parents are still often fearful for them, and go overboard in protecting them from risk, real or imagined.
He suggests that much ‘delinquent’ behaviour is a product of kids resorting to illegitimate for outlets for the natural desire for risk, adventure and identity when they haven’t been provided with legitimate expressions of risk.
This is always a challenge for us as parents – encouraging our kids to take responsibilities and risks at a pace that is appropriate for them. We want to take care of our kids, but at the same time want them to become adults that know their own capabilities, and are able cope sensibly with new situations. It’s not fair to any kid to make all their decisions for them and protect them from the consequences of their actions for twenty years, and then throw them out into the ‘real’ world and expect them to manage well.
Posted in books, homeschooling | No Comments »
June 19th, 2007
I can’t say enough good things about Firebug. It’s been an absolute godsend for me while putting together this TurboGears project. Every last little bit of communication between the browser and the server can be examined and profiled, every bit of html and css can be identified, queried, and even modified, right in the browser. I now can’t imagine trying to debug an AJAX app without it.
As far as I know, the author is basically one guy working in his spare time. I’m not sure if this is a testament to the power of open source, or the strength of the underlying mozilla platform, or what, but I’m once again amazed that the open source world can produce tools of this caliber and make them available for free.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 7th, 2007
Having put in all the work for a nice infrastructure for my current project, I think that it’s beginning to pay off. Now I can make changes to my TurboGears app in JEdit, have the changes picked up by CherryPy’s auto-reload feature and test and debug in a very tight cycle. Then when I’m happy with them I can push them upstream with a quick subversion check in, and a few seconds later my changes are running on the production machine. All in all, I feel as if programming could actually become pleasant again. And I must say that TurboGears is a nice way to develop GUI’s – describing the layout in XHTML is far nicer than all the grief I used to have to go back in the day when I was building desktop apps with MFC.
Posted in Programming, TurboGears, python | No Comments »
June 1st, 2007
I think that I’ve spent maybe 10 minutes today writing actual production code, and many, many hours dealing with dropping SSH connections, spotty wireless access, wrestling with TurboGears’ logging system, trying to figure out why code that used to compile on Solaris 9 doesn’t anymore since the system upgrade to 10, and just generally trying to put into place a workflow that will actually make me productive for my current projects.
It’s clear to me that being able to write software is only one, fairly small component of successfully creating systems. Being able to manage the complexity of disparate, changing systems without going crazy is critical. And being able to choose wisely between multiple technology options is also critical – the ability to distinguish between the package that is going to be a lifesaver and the one that will send you to an early grave as it continually causes more problems than it solves.
Posted in Programming, work | No Comments »