david petar novakovic: attempted axiomatisation

Did you know Python can….?

My brother made this comic strip about me…

The saddest thing is that it’s True. (hidden python joke in there)

In: about me, python on 10 / Oct / 2008 | 3 Comments »

Another reason why DRM is evil.

Walmart is shutting down its DRM servers because it isn’t making money from keeping them up and running. I thought this comment from Slashdot was a pretty nice summary.

They can demand all they want. Doesn’t mean they will get it. Also this is yet another reason why DRM is evil. There is no money in continuing to maintain the DRM servers once you stop selling music. Once whoever you buy from decides to stop support, you are out of luck. This is the third service that I have heard of shutting down. I’m sure more will come in the future. I’m not sure how long it will take for people to realize just how bad DRM is.

Sigh. DRM.

In: evil on 28 / Sep / 2008 | No Comments »

Creatives working with Programmers

I just had a rather insightful email from a colleague in a creative team at a company I’m doing some consulting for. As essentially a creative company, their technology aspect has not grown with much structure. I’m there to try and help bring in some processes for everyone’s sanity. This means getting a creative team to work nicely with a team of programmers and vice versa. Anyway, his email prompted this response from me attempting to put programming in the context of writing creatively. I thought I’d share my understanding of this situation:

Dear Someone,

I found it very clear. You are exactly right here, these are the very
same factors that influence the quality of code the technology team
produces.

What I’ve found is that distractions (generally most of the things in
your list) cause us to lose what we were working on. They destroy the
castle in the sky we have built in our minds, just like forgetting
good storyline before it hits paper. Unfortunately it takes time to
get to where we were before, and even then we may not have the same
vision we already had. The processes creatives and programmers go
through are very similar. I can visualise what I’m working on from
beginning to end, I move it backward and forward in my brain as I work
on it, just like a good story line (for me anyway).

When a client changes the storyline under your feet, you have to go
through your whole storyline and adjust it, especially making sure
things are consistent. Unfortunately code isn’t a line, it’s a big
massive tree with exponential branches, it can be VERY tiresome for a
programmer to go and check all the branches. Often the problems that
pop up in systems happen because we don’t have an automatic way to go
and check all the branches. This is pretty crazy, we are programmers,
we should be able to automate the checking.. in a way it should be
_easier_ than writing.

The thing with programmers is that once they have written code that
works they will often just move onto the next thing “confident” in the
knowledge what they have written works. Code is rarely perfect at
first cut, and sometimes bugs pop up much later. So that confidence is
really a big lie.

What I’m trying to achieve with the dev team is to get them to write
the tests to check their code, something that no-one is doing yet,
purely out of lack of experience i think. They are all good
programmers, they just haven’t had the exposure to some of the
industry standard way of doing things.

By testing their code properly, they can automatically check all the
branches of their story. The end goal is to make them happy to hear
about changes from the creative team, rather than dread them. As long
as these changes come within relatively controlled boundaries it
should work out better for everyone.

Hopefully we’ll be able to create more understanding like this.

In: project management on 15 / Sep / 2008 | 2 Comments »

Malicious Link Farms in dpn.name

I thought upgrading my version of wordpress would close the hole. Anyone know how to stop the malicious bots sticking link farms into my header and footer?

In: blog on 24 / Aug / 2008 | 4 Comments »

FriendFeed doesn’t play nice with other services.

FriendFeed doesn’t play nice with other services. It stores the information on it’s own servers and relies on people adding a FriendFeed comment plugin to their blog to display the comments alongside the comments of their dedicated readers.

I was going to write this post as a bit of a brain dump for Roger Kondrat about how I think FriendFeed doesn’t play nice with other services. Upon starting research I realised that I’d be aggregating the opinions of others to support my own claims… so I decided to instead just voice my opinion and leave myself open for corrections.

As an example, to leave a comment on http://inquisitr.com I can leave one with either FriendFeed or Disqus.

Which service should I leave a comment with?

Shouldn’t FriendFeed be redistributing the comments back to the original sources of the information where possible? People are missing valuable comments about their content. Fred Wilson has raised the same issue previously. I have written about FriendFeed moving conversation away from content sources already.

Perhaps it’s possible to use the FriendFeed API to redistribute comments back to their original sources. I’m sure people have tried it. Anyone heard of anything to do this?

In: blog on 24 / Aug / 2008 | 3 Comments »

Design Patterns in Python?

I was browsing Ash’s blog and noticed he had linked to a bunch of C# design patterns. I’ve been thinking about patterns a bit lately, especially in the context of dynamic programming languages. This is a tough topic to write about without getting into a dynamic vs static debate. I definitely think there are advantages to both, and while I’m not a big fan of static languages, I think there is a lot to be learned from the so called restrictions associated with static languages.

When it comes to managing large code bases I’ve found that learning from the patterns used in Java/C# has greatly helped me. The patterns have helped for the very same reason I love writing in Python, code readability. By using the same “meta” language consistently in code, it makes it easier for others to read, for people new to the code base to pick up, and easier to extend.

The extensibility has become a big part of the code too, but creating objects that interact with each other through well known patterns we can then understand how to extend these systems more easily further down the track.

That’s my one catch cry about using a dynamic language, it doesn’t stop lazy programmers from doing lazy things, so it’s not for everyone. But if you have some discipline you can really enjoy writing terse, readable and reusable code.

In: python on 21 / Aug / 2008 | 2 Comments »