April 2007

Monthly Archive

Sun 29 Apr 2007

Captain, PEPs incoming!

Posted by Collin under python 3000 , python
No Comments 

There’s…too many of them!

Following Guido’s announcement/reminder that all Python 3000-related PEPs* have to be in by the end of April, PEPs have been coming out of the woodwork:

  • PEP 3119 - Guido’s abstract base classes PEP.

  • PEP 3120 - Using UTF-8 as the default source encoding

  • PEP 3121 - More flexible module Initialization and finalization.

  • PEP 3122 - Change how the “main” module is delineated. (This PEP has already been rejected.)

  • PEP 3141 - A proposal for a hierarchy of numeric base classes, based on PEP 3119.

There’re also several pre-PEPs being kicked around in the mailing lists:

*: PEPs impacting the stdlib don’t have to meet this deadline.

 

Sun 22 Apr 2007

First two weeks at Google

Posted by Collin under google
1 Comment 

“I work for Google”.

That’s pretty damn ridiculous.

Working at Google feels very much like being back at college — admittedly, a college populated primarily by computer people; it’s like an IT version of Planet of the Apes.

Google takes extraordinary steps to integrate new hires into the corporate culture as fast and as comprehensively as possible. Nooglers spend the first two weeks in classes about the company’s core systems, a time when you’re expected to be absolutely unproductive and just learn. Every Noogler is assigned a mentor who serves as your go-to person all the stupid questions you have: why won’t my computer boot? (My first day) How do I run a test suite? (My fifth day) What’s the command to request a code review? (Yesterday)

I’ve been assigned to the Build Tools group where I’ll be working on Mondrian, Google’s new change-review tool created by Guido van Rossum. I also want to get involved with the various testing-focused groups, something Neal Norwitz is urging on.

This place is awesome.

 

Sun 1 Apr 2007

Dear Firefox

Posted by Collin under general technology
[9] Comments 

Why do you crash all the time? You used to be so well-behaved, back in your 1.0.whatever days. Then you upgraded to 1.5 and you started segfaulting. Not every day, not even every week, but enough that it was a pain in the ass. Now, with the 2.0 branch, you crash every single goddamn day. Looking at the little TalkBack dialog that just popped up, you’ve crashed 10 times since I upgraded to 2.0.3 last week; I thought bug fix releases were supposed to, I don’t know, fix bugs.

Today you’ve segfaulted twice in two hours. This has got to stop.

Now I see that there’s a there’s a 3.0 release coming this year. New features are great fun to work on, I’m sure, and tracking down whatever bug keeps killing my browser sessions isn’t sexy, but seriously: how about putting in a little time to make the current release series stable? Please?