Bitten by a python

While trying to fix yet another charset problem in my perl rssfetch script, i decided to give python a go, because i wanted to try Mark Pilgrim’s feedparser. Although I knew zero about python, with help of Google and uza’s great python book i was able to rewrite the program in a very short time. The new script is much shorter, more readable, has less bugs and more features. So I think I like python and I will try to rewrite my other perl scripts in python.
Download py-rssfetch-0.1 and review my first python script 🙂

Soundtrack November 2004

I will try to post a new soundtrack regulary every month consisting of songs i heard very often that month. This month a lot more Electronic and Dancemusic appeared on my playlist:

Sezen Aksu – Åžarkı Söylemek Lazım
Calexico – El Morro
Carl Craig – Mind of a machine
Evanescence – Going under
Barbara Tucker – I get lifted
Miss Kittin vs Marshall Jefferson – Mushrooms
Takuro meets Vanessa Mae – Way of Difference
Tangerine Dream – Das Madchen auf dem Dach
Yazoo – Chinese detectives

FreeBSD 5.3 in the press

Today I received the latest c’t magazine. It featured a two pages article about FreeBSD 5.3 by Bj�rn K�nig. Unfortunately the article is very bad. Even myself as a developer had problems understanding what the author was talking about. The content of the article is basically a mixture of BSD History, excerpts from the official press release and some passages from the handbook plus a wrong BSD Family tree and the standard daemon image. Although the author posts to BSD Newgroups and Mailinglist frequently, he didn’t wrote anything about his personal experience with FreeBSD, did he even tried to install version 5.x? As a FreeBSD Newbie I am missing information about the installation (screenshots :-), as a FreeBSD 4.x user I am missing information about the differences between 4.x and 5.x. And as a hacker i am missing information about new features in the kernel.
I tried to find a better article on the web, but unfortunately the press section of the FreeBSD website is two months out of date. And the articles on news.google.com were all not more than excerpts from the press release.
Same with the blogosphere. Some FreeBSD users saying “Cool!” and “Finally!”, but nothing substantial.
Can any of my readers point me to a good professional neutral review of FreeBSD 5.3? Or is FreeBSD really dying?

EuroBSDCon reprise II

There is now another article on ONLamp about EuroBSDCon, Inside EuroBSDCon by Federico Biancuzzi.
Since writing comments to the article seems to be broken, he gets a Trackback.
Federico, I think at the moment the target audience is quite clear, people that care enough about BSD to spend at least 600 Euro to attend a BSD conference. This includes developers and interested users and companies. And I prefer to listen to talks of developers like rwatson at EuroBSDCon.
But I agree, that there are possibilities to save money. E.g. IMHO there is no need for the conference to take place in a 4+ stars hotel. For most people a three stars hotel is enough. And the conference rooms could as well be in a university, school or education company.
Of course EuroBSDCon should not replace local conferences targeting newtobsd users.

Why “computer science” is a bad term

I just orderd the book “Hackers and Painters” by Paul Graham after reading this article
In the example chapter is my quote of the day:

If what [hackers] are doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to design beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they ought to be writing research papers.

Luckily in German it is called “Informatik”, so there are people at our university, that still write real software 🙂

Snow

I spent the weekend in Salzburg. They have real snow and not only storms and rain like here in Vienna.
My girlfriend’s brother fell from the roof while fixing rooftiles. Luckily he survived falling down ca. seven meter onto the concrete courtyard without major injuries. He is now in hospital; the emergency physician diagnosed internal bleedings, a strained hamstring and a twisted thig. (hm, my anatomy vocabulary is really bad).

Dports Bugreport closed

Today I noticed that my Darwinbugreport has been fixed two months ago. Only 10 months after i submitted it. Neither did the committer close the Bug report nor did he credit me in the commit log.
Who said that bugzilla would be a solution to fighting FreeBSD Bug reports?
Darwinports are a lot smaller, they use a proclaimed better tool and they still can’t handle their bug reports. Long live GNATS!