The biggest change of that last bit is the switch to Python.

Python is fucking weird.

Yeah, there’s The Whitespace Abomination. The reality is, you get over it. It’s a HUGE deal at first; just awful, terrible, crap. It’s just the dumbest idea anyone could ever have, there’s no sanity to those arguments you see about readability, it’s some magical bullshit thinking. Lisp’s paren soup is NOTHING compared to this bullshit!

It just sort of goes away after a while. It’s still bothersome and weird but I’ve got my editor configured properly now, so generally it’s not really a problem. In fact I tend to end statements with a semicolon more often than making some indentation-related boo-boo!

Python is often called “easy”, and I think it lives up to that description. That said, I think idiomatic Python isn’t easy. Python wants to make it such that there’s one obvious way to do it; but is that one way actually obvious?

In the Python I’ve seen lately, they tend to do the Ruby thing of, “module M contains class C and also a grab-bag of functions”. I’ve spent rather a lot of time in the past few years doing what amounted to Java Lite: large applications are structured by interfaces, abstract classes, and implementations. So, the idea of “here is a class and also some functions” is just … odd. I sort-of get how it works with Python’s namespace/module system, and I’m sure it’ll make more sense as time goes on, but as a switcher it’s positively strange.

Also, tools like virtualenv and the more complex elements of the Python ecosystem aren’t immediately obvious. Coming from a background in PHP or Perl, Python can actually be pretty intimidating if you’re not working in an established platform like Django: what do I do about MySQL? What do I do about web server integration? What do I do about etc etc etc? Scoff all you want, but the fact is hitting http://www.php.net/manual/en/funcref.php is mostly all you need to get rolling on PHP projects, and of course CPAN remains one of the gold standards for code repos. (In fact, CPAN might be too large at this point.)

Anyway. I’ve written a couple of non-trivial Python scripts now, and I’m trying to get more into designing things to be “Pythonic”. We’ll see. I can’t say I’m happy with Python yet, but it’s still pretty new (it’s been all of a month) and so I’m at that strange place in the learning curve.

I feel like I’m leaving behind code and systems that were in better shape than when I arrived. Hard not to when you arrive to a giant pile of Sun hardware, running ancient versions of Solaris. I leave behind 100% Linux, running on commodity hardware, a change I brought to the company.

Our primary application, a horrible mess of PHP4 spaghetti when I started hacking on it, is a slightly less horrible lasagna of PHP 5.3+, and there’s a good first pass at a modern PHP app in the repo as well.

There’s more than a few things I didn’t accomplish that I set out to do. Some of them, we were simply “overtaken by events”. The business has a way of turning underneath you – it’s part of the fun. In other cases, the current business climate simply isn’t right. Austerity is the order of the day, and fewer and fewer customers were willing to spend money to make money (to name but one example).

I’m proud of some of the work I’ve done, but I won’t be sad to see PHP go (the new job is a Python shop). A couple years ago I went all-in on PHP; I even obtained a Zend certification. PHP often deserves much of the hate people throw at it, but there’s also a lot of smart, innovative people who are really trying to push the language/platform in the right direction.

I’m super-excited about the opportunities at the new place. I’m really looking forward to kicking a lot of ass for them. All the skills I bring, I honed in the salt mine.

Contrary to what you’d probably guess, I didn’t get an iPhone; I got a Blackberry, and the free one at that (a 9300 series).

“But Blackberry sucks! They’re going out of business!”, you may think. You’re right, sort of.

One thing I learned since I got an iPad was I don’t like the smartphone form factor. Increasing the size of the device (what seems like the current Android device solution) to me just seems to create a form factor that’s further inferior to both the slightly smaller iPhone and larger iPad.

The things I want most from a phone are the 3 “T’s”: Talk, Text, and Twitter. I’d like decent email support. And that’s … pretty much it. Maps or a web browser or Angry Birds or ssh or 10 billion other things, I simply don’t do. I made myself angry (and spent too much money) trying to convince myself otherwise.

For all of the OMG BLACKBERRY SUCKS talk, it is still a pretty good email and text device. From my point of view, the recent problems with RIM are more about “how did you idiots make so many bad decisions in a row, when you were on top?” more than “your technology sucks”. They’re making bad decisions with an otherwise workable tech platform.

One day, when I go places and do things, maybe I’ll upgrade to an iPhone. Until then, my iPad is all I need for most everything, and the Blackberry is my ideal handset.

I disabled Google Reader sync last night and switched back to NetNewsWire on the desktop, doing local sync.

On the plus side, there’s not a HUGE amount of feeds I follow any more. Also, I never go anywhere so the lack of Google Reader sync isn’t crippling.

BUT: my main use case is, Mac downstairs as “digital hub” and iPad everywhere else (couch, bed, porch, etc). Unless I’m sitting at my Mac to do work, I’m using my iPad; I watch TV on my Apple TV; I listen to music streamed from the Mac via Home Sharing from iTunes.

What I really really want is to have NetNewsWire/iPad to sync to the desktop, much in the way the Yojimbo iPad app does.

I know it’s not some “look at me I’m SUPER MOBILE”, work-at-the-coffee-shop thing, but it works great and is probably (hopefully?) less error-prone than the scenarios Brent describes.

Very interested in a “withering” criticism of Windows 8 and Metro, I click through, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but those 2 words that send shivers through my spine:

John. Dvorak.

People. John Dvorak has never been right about anything, ever.

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things.

(Source)

And from there it’s been one endless pageview troll after another, for his entire career. I’m pretty sure he’s never been right about anything. (Wikipedia calls it his “pithy” style “attracts critics who point out his frequent—and occasionally egregious—errors of prediction”.

So from that you can pretty much expect that Windows 8 and Metro will be a smash hit, much like the “mouse” that no one wanted.

Beyond Stephen Hawking: “Supermassive Black Holes Could Have Regions Where Life and Planets Exist”

Ohhh… kay.

It starts out OK enough, with basic talk about singularities and research by a Russian cosmologist. But then:

Dokuchaev’s research demonstrates that “living inside the eternal black holes is possible in principle, if these black holes are rotating or charged and massive enough for weakening the tidal forces and radiation of gravitational waves to acceptable level.” Type III advanced civilizations on the Kardashev scale that have achieved mastery of the resources of their galaxy, could inhabit such black hole interiors.
“We hypothesize that the advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei being invisible from the outside,” writes Dokuchaev in his study.

Dude, that’s … that’s part of the backstory of Doctor Who. (Sorta)

Then it stagnated horribly, it gets updated perhaps once per year (and then only to keep it running on the new OS release), and god forbid you find a bug: it will probably never be fixed.

(As I write this there is an alpha promised by Xmas. Many are understandably cynical about this.)

A bunch of projects started up to fill the vacuum created by TM2′s vaporware status. Without sounding too negative on what was an incredible amount of work, they’ve managed to re-implement much of TM1 in the time it took to get TM2 to alpha status. That said making your app compatible with the huge TM1 ecosystem (and what may be the TM2 ecosystem) is an obvious good design call.

Anyway, the two I had immediate access to are Vico and Sublime Text 2. More on Sublime Text 2 later.

To reduce it to the simplest description, Vico is a vi implementation in Cocoa (or at any rate, Mac-native) that is mostly TM-compatible (themes and bundles).

(Also note: I’m sort of unfairly conflating vi and vim here. Pedants, don’t freak out. Hopefully you’ll get what I mean.)

Whether or not you consider vi’s modal editing a plus or minus is not really even worth debating. If you don’t like modal editing, don’t bother to even try any modal editor.

Vico supports a pretty finite subset of vi commands, but enough that you’ll preserve basic muscle-memory when editing. As near as I can tell, commands aren’t as “composable” as a real vi, but that’s where the bundles take over.

Vico supports a subset of TM bundles, so you can probably drop in some functionality that would normally be done with vim macros or scripts.

You can also “drive” Vico’s functionality with built-in scripting using the Nu language. Nu is the (perhaps unholy?) fusion of LISP and Objective-C/Cocoa.  And example of using Nu scripting to perform an editor task (automatically hard-wrapping text in this case) is on the Vico blog.

Is that any better than Vim script, or ELisp? I dunno. Vico seems like too much mashed together. It’s in a weird place: if you’re determined to retain modal editing, why not just use MacVim? Well, MacVim is … not so much ugly as plain. So, assuming the creator can keep up with the state of the art enough to keep the users happy, it’s a nice way to appeal to modal editor junkies who somehow don’t fancy MacVim.

But what of the people coming from TM? Isn’t modal editing a huge change, even if it lets them keep some of their workflow? OK, you’re addicted to some set of TM features, but hopping into the world of modal editing seems like as big a jump as switching to some other editor (BBEdit, etc).

Anyway, Vico is an interesting project and I sincerely hope it stays around for a long time: I’m hugely in favor of taking “venerable” Unix concepts and wrapping them in modern clothes.

Please don’t.

FTP is insecure. Your password can be the single-most unbreakable string in the universe, but it doesn’t matter: it’s sent out over plain text. Moreover, anyone who’s been in the sysadmin game for more than 12 minutes has seen just about every FTP server get cornholed, literally cornholed, multiple times by securtity flaws.

The best thing the “technology community” can do is to actively discourage its use.

FTP over SSL is a better interim solution, if keeping “pure” the FTP protocol is required.

And enough about the damn “extra overhead” of SSH or SSL. We’re talking about a few bytes here, esp. when you’re on a LAN.

The sooner FTP dies, the closer we are to a world of endpoint secure protocols.

Now, this feature is wonderful if you’re a long-time BBEdit user. It’s pretty extra awesome if like me you can only run PeepOpen on some of your Macs. And, for switchers looking for a native way to replicate their beloved cmd-t, it’s not bad.

That said I can totally understand why switchers would say “Not the same, not what I want/need”. My dream was to see them re-use the same dialog as the “Insert Clipping” window, which is just like (or damn near, in any event) TextMate’s window. PeepOpen includes extra functionality like showing SCM status.

Still, you can bind it to cmd-t and it’ll work close enough that your muscle memory might not get too confused. And be sure to check out the even more recent betas; they’ve been doing some big performance improvements (one of the reasons I have always kept BBEdit in my Applications folder, even when I’m trying out another editor or using an IDE for stuff like Java).