Archive 9/2006

Long trips definitely suck, esp. when you're making them alone. Exactly for these occasions I absolutely love the battery in my little PowerBook 12": Nearly 4 hours if I treat it nicely and so I normally also take something to read with me on the trip ... on my Mac

Well, OK, in my train there were enough plugs in each area, so I could have also brightened the whole thing up and done some more compiling, but I guess esp. the latter on would have burned my Jeans.

• Train tickets? Check
• Hotel reservation? Check
• BlogTalk reservation? Check

... OK, I guess I have everything now. And since the train ride will take about 4 hours, I will also charge my iPod. Just to be on the safe side I just hope that the Wifi in the TechGate won't suck. For 18EUR for 24h shared 11MBps you should normally be able to expect something but T-Mobile doesn't even offer information on what crypto is used.

Today I wanted to write a small little tool that I could stick into my MacOSX dock and simply drag'n drop stuff onto it. Since the whole processing in the background is already done using some Python libs I wanted to see how I could get a simply Python script into that dock. The problem here is, that MacOSX has two different areas in the dock:

• One for handling applications
• and one for files and folder (like the trash bin)

... and MacOSX recognizes scripts as the later one. Everything following in the first category seems to be a really .app.

Long story short: Python2.5 just got released. And here a list of things I'm really looking forward playing with:

• An explicit distinction between absolute and relative imports (see the PEP328 what's new part for details)
• The new "with" statement which looks to me very much like what Ruby's doing with blocks so it basically offers code an explicit context (PEP343 section).
• And I think it's really great, that ElementTree and the new hashlib are now finally in the stdlib

This is just my list based on the "What's new" section since I had no time playing around with 2.5 yet Hopefully this will change this weekend

Is it just me or is Sony really preparing a big disaster for their PS3 launch in Japan and the USA this November? Today GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer reported (quoting IGN), that the PS3 version of Tony Hawk's Project 8 (which is slated as a launch title for the blue diode sucker) will not include an online component because they still haven't received all required libs and no details about the online components of the PS3. I guess, who wants to do some Skateboard magic online will have to do this on Xbox Live then.

Seems like Amazon is fed up with the whole international currency situation and has decided to create one of its own. Although, a name would have been nice. 205,72 what?

• European bundle (+ Wii Sports)

Some random Python hints I learned over the last week while writing on my first Django website (Note: All things mentioned here are in the official docs, but I haven't noticed them before looking at code others have written):

If you want to have a tuple, better play it safe and write ("hello",) instead of ("hello"). Since the braces can also be used to control the precedence of a statement, adding the extra "," will make sure, that you really get a tuple, no matter what number of elements is in there.

Named groups is in my opinion one of the coolest things I've seen with RE done so far. I don't know, if this also works in other languages, but it just makes regex much more readable if you have something like this:

Finally Ruby has now also a nice website. The whole site is now in my opinion much more usable with offering links in prominent positions to guides on how to find an use 3rd-party libraries, the documentation and so on.

The site now also uses Ruby on Rails in the backend with a CMS that has been written in the process of creating that site and that has also been open source'd. Great work

For more details, check out the announcement on ruby-lang.org.

Via O'Reilly's Ruby channel

1. If you pay lots of money for a gun in a game, better use it. For the last year or so I was avoiding finishing Ratchet & Clank for the PS2, because I always died in the last stage and got reset to somewhere right after the start. A few months before that happened for the first time, I played it quite a lot to get these 1.000.000 credits to get the super weapon in that game: The R.I.D.A. ... just to never use it. Yesterday I used it for the first time, and finally finished the game. Hurrayyy. Next.
2. Trust Apple to surprise you. Well. To make a long story short: I love the new Core2Duo iMacs The specs look really great and I can't wait to get some money to get myself one of them for my birthday in 2 months